Hertel and Zhai evaluate the impact of two key factor market distortions in China on rural-urban inequality and income distribution. They find that creation of a fully functioning land market has a significant impact on rural-urban inequality. This reform permits agricultural households to focus...

Using the dismantling of trade quotas on Chinese textile and clothing products in conjunction with China's accession to the WTO and an employer-employee matched data-set for the period 1999 to 2010, workers' adjustments to intensified low-wage competition is analyzed. Utilizing within-industry...

This paper reports findings from a Vancouver study which examines the settlement and adaptation experience of Chinese immigrants in Vancouver. The study reveals that non-economic reasons, such as the environment, education and citizenship, constituted the primary motivations for Chinese...

Coordination in collective wage setting can constrain potential monopoly gains to unions in non-traded-goods industries. Countries with national wage coordination can thus stabilize overall employment against fluctuations and shocks in the world economy. We test this theory by exploring...

In this paper, we rely on the plausibly exogeneous relaxations in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policies from 2007 to 2015 to study the impact of FDI liberalization on occupational mobility in China. To quantify the policy changes, we create a 4-digit FDI liberalization index and link it with...

Using original survey data from China, we estimate a discrete duration model to study the reemployment of urban workers who lost jobs during China's major restructuring of the state sector in the late 1990s. Using an exogenous measure of social networks, the number of relatives living in the...

Domestic mobility restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 are widespread in developing countries, and have trapped millions of migrant workers in hotspot cities. We show that bans can increase cumulative infections relative to a counterfactual san restrictions. A SEIR model shows bans’...

As China implements reforms under the “new normal,” maintaining stability in the labor market is a priority. The country's demography and labor dynamics are changing, after benefitting in past decades from ample cheap labor. So far, the labor market appears to be resilient, even as growth...

Maintaining today’s global imbalances would help overcome the major disproportion of our times — income gap between developed and developing countries. This gap was widening for 500 years, since the XVI century, and only now, in recent 60 years, there are some signs that this gap is starting...