Chapter from: 'Rising Inequality in China: Challenge to a Harmonious Society', edited by Shi Li, Hiroshi Sato and Terry Sicular.

The self-employed are a heterogeneous group. Some are self-employed because they are good at it, while others are self-employed because they cannot find a better paying salaried job. Data from the CPS for prime age males show that workers are almost twice as likely to enter self-employment from...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that a positive technology shock leads to a decline in labor inputs. However, the standard real business cycle model fails to account for this empirical regularity. Can the presence of labor market frictions address this problem without otherwise altering the...

In this paper we challenge the traditional labour market view, which argues that unemployment is determined in the long-term by its equilibrium rate, which in turn is affected by permanent shocks of some exogenous variables. In our empirical approach we decompose the dynamics of employment and...

Conventional wisdom suggests that nominal, demand-side shocks have only temporary effects on real macroeconomic magnitudes and that the duration of their effects depends on the degree of nominal inertia. It is also argued that, in the absence of unit roots, temporary supply-side shocks also have...