This study investigates the redistributive effect of the social security reform in urban China using the nationally representative urban household surveys in 1995 and 2002. The main findings are as follows. First, public pension is the main income for the elderly in urban China. Majority of...

We revisit a classic question in international economics: how does a country's productivity growth affect worldwide real incomes through international trade? We first identify the channels through which productivity shocks transmit in a model featuring inter-industry trade as in Ricardo (1817),...

The core-periphery (CP) model of urban systems lacks evidence from real data for the nonlinear relationship between distance to core and market potential. China remains in the process of industrialization and globalization, thereby making it suitable for practical application of the CP model of...

Using a 2006 household survey from the Ningxia Hui autonomous region in China, this paper examines two aspects of the correlation between ethnicity and income: namely, differences in the returns to human capital and the effects of ethnicity- and religion-related social capital. The findings...

In a country such as China, which maintains strict controls on foreign exchange and frequently intervenes in the currency market, it is not surprising that the local currency is persistently undervalued in nominal terms. Normally, one would expect such a policy of deliberate currency...

Many developing countries experience famine. If survival is related to height, the increasingly common practice of using height as a measure of well-being may be misleading. We devise a novel method for disentangling the stunting from the selection effects of famine. Using data from the...

In this paper we extend our previous studies (Didenko et al., 2012; Földvári et al., 2012; Van Leeuwen et al., 2011) on the role of conventional factors of production (fixed, or physical, and human forms of capital) and their productivity depending on their interrelations and economic development...