This article evaluates the Chinese labour market by examining the role of human capital in wage determination. Using data from China’s Household Nutrition Survey, we estimate the returns to education in state-owned, collective-owned and private sectors. In the private sectors, the returns to...

Using a 1/5 random draw of the 1% census of 2005, we investigate how China’s higher education expansion commenced in 1999 affects the education opportunities of various population groups and how this policy affects the labor market. Treating the expansion as an experiment and using a LATE...

As massive rural residents leave their home countryside for better employment, migration has profound effects on income distributions such as rural-urban income gap and inequalities within rural or urban areas. The nature of the effects depends crucially on who are migrating and their migrating...

We use three waves of urban household survey data from 1995 to 2007 to investigate the trends of residual inequality and its determinants. First, we describe the change of overall and residual wage inequality over time. One important new pattern is that the rise in both the overall and residual...

We use household surveys from 1995, 2002, and 2007 to examine how changes in job structure contributed to China's rising urban wage inequality, considering three job characteristics: occupation, industry, and firm ownership. The explanatory power of job structure for wage inequality increased...

The rapid and massive increase of rural-to-urban migration in China has drawn attention to the welfare of migrant workers, particularly to their working conditions and pay. This paper uses data from a random draw of the 2005 Chinese national census survey to investigate discrimination in urban...