Although urban China has experienced spectacular income growth over the last two decades, increases in inequality, reduction in social welfare provision, deregulation of grain prices, and increases in income uncertainty in the 1990s have increased urban poverty. Using a large repeated...

A unique survey of Shanghai residents in 1996 that combined labor-market information, appraisals of respondents' beauty, and household expenditures allows us to examine the relative magnitudes of the investment and consumption components of women's spending on beauty-enhancing goods and...

The employment shock of late 2008 in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) may have been a product of three different events : (i) the contractionary macroeconomic policies introduced by the government and the central bank in 2007 to slow growth, (ii) the introduction of the new Labor Contract Law...

This paper investigates the institutional causes of China's Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered...

This paper investigates the institutional causes of China's Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered...

Although a significant wage gap has been found in many previous studies between urban workers and rural migrants in Chinese cities, it is still not clear how such a wage gap may evolve over time. This paper uses both a dynamic wage decomposition method and economic assimilation model with pooled...