The construction industry is important for Chinese rural to urban migrants. Over 90%of urban construction workers are rural migrants, and over a third of all rural migrantswork in construction. The construction industry is not only particularly important, butis also different from other...

Throughout the developing world, there is a desperate quest for a way out ofthe financial predicament confronting the rural poor. In most countries of thedeveloping regions, especially South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the ruralpopulation forms the larger proportion of the entire population and...

Politicians and farm lobbyists frequently use the argument that agricultural policy is necessaryto safeguard jobs in agriculture. We explore whether this is true by conducting an econometricex-post evaluation of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the threeEast German...

This paper studies changes over time in the incidence of labor tying. The existingliterature is successful in explaining the emergence of this institution, but contains thecounterfactual implication that there should be an increasing trend in labor tying. However,previous contributions have so...

This paper demonstrates that urban social exclusion in China does not onlyinclude restricted participation by the “underclass” in urban life, but also thedeprivation of certain political, social and economic rights. In addition, thepaper describes how the character of urban social exclusion...

This paper examines the roles of specialized versus general skills in explaining variation in thereturns to an agriculture degree across majors inside and outside the agricultural industry. Thefocus on returns by sector of employment is motivated by the finding that most agriculturalmajors are...

We examine the relationship between participation in non-agricultural labor activities and farming production decisions, focusing on the use of inputs. In particular, we are interested in the hypothesis that income from non-agricultural labor relaxes credit constraints...

Entrepreneurship literature (Parker 2004) has rarely considered spatial locationas a micro-determinant of occupational choice, although there are compellingreasons to posit that spatial location influences economic behavior. Using Bayesiansemiparametric methodologies and geoadditive techniques,...

This paper aims to test empirically if certain frequently used measures of wellbeing,which are regarded as valuable properties of human life, are actuallydesired by people. In other words, it investigates whether the “expertjudgments” in social science overlap with social consensus on what...

Economic transition lowered happiness on average, but did not affect allequally. This paper uses Hungarian survey data to study the impact ofreligion and economic transition on happiness. Religious involvementcontributes positively to individuals’ self-reported well-being.Controlling for...