This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

Food processing has been widely recognized as a traditional, unskilled-labor intensive production. Yet rapid development in technology drives food processing into more sophisticated and technology-oriented industry. This paper utilizes a fixed effects model to test the hypothesis that the food...

This paper examines changes in agriculture and livelihood system in four Chinese villages, on the basis of two waves village-wide household surveys conducted over a decade interval. To identify the factors that are important in accounting for variation in household income change, an income...

This study provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the linkages between land fragmentation and off-farm labor supply and investigates this relationship empirically in a more direct and robust way than in the existing literature. Drawing upon a rural household panel dataset collected in...

This work is devoted to the analysis of the different labor market participation regimes of Chinese farm households. Using household data over the period 1986-2000 from the province Zhejiang, we apply a multinomial logit model to empirically examine household, farm, and regional characteristics...

New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM) theory posits a complex relationship between migrants and household income generation. This paper uses NELM and original survey data to examine the impacts of migration on income sources in Northeast China. Migration is found to increase farm incomes but...

This study establishes a life-cycle model that a representative agent chooses optimal time of education to maximize his/her life earning, which implies that there may exist nonlinear relation between education and earning. Using the data of Chinese off-farm wage employment, we find that the...

The major objective of this paper is to discuss the development of rural labor markets in China during the past two decades and understand how it has affected women. Using household survey data that we collected in 2001, we examine the role of women in labor markets by examining employment and...

Based on the introduction of research theories about rural labor force transfer at home and abroad, taking Liaocheng City as the representative of medium and small cities, transfer situation of rural labor force in Liaocheng City is discussed from several aspects, including the transfer of total...

The work focuses on the frequency of each possible transition between labor market participation regimes of rural Chinese households. A continuous hazard approach is applied to empirically evaluate factors, as household, farm, and regional characteristics affecting the frequency of transition...