The Chinese economy has been undergoing fundamental structural changes since the start of reforms in 1978. An increasing number of farmers first got engaged in off-farm activities and then started to migrate to cities in the 1990s in search of jobs. Such movement of labour from less to more...

This paper investigates the effect of robot adoption on employment adjustment in China. By using detailed Chinese firm-level data and addressing endogeneity, we find that using industrial robots increases employment within firms, especially when focusing on the employment of high-educated and...

Robots are widely used in industrial manufacturing and service industries around the world. Drawing on a large dataset of more than three million records in China, this study examines the impact of imported industrial robots on firm innovation. Using a difference-in-differences method, we find...

This paper estimates the causal effect of rural-urban migration on urban production in China. We use longitudinal data on manufacturing firms between 2001 and 2006 and exploit exogenous variation in rural-urban migration due to agricultural price shocks. Following a migrant inflow, labor costs...

This paper highlights new findings on the wage-productivity nexus in the World Factory Economy. After presenting the long-run macro-elasticity characterizing the phase of Chinese economic development since the eighties, we look at the wage-productivity nexus from a micro level perspective using...

This empirical analysis explores the impact of industrial robots on labour productivity using panel data of 17 Chinese industries from 2006 to 2021. The results reveal that the development of industrial robots significantly improves labour productivity; a series of robustness tests validate this...

The large regional variation of minimum wage changes in 2002-08 implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from labor to capital in...

The large regional variation in minimum wage levels in the period 2002-08 in China implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from...

The paper analyzes the link between human capital and firm-level productivity in five Asian countries. It draws on a dataset of over 4,000 enterprises and considers both the prior educational attainment of workers and in-service training programs of enterprises. Differences between small,...

We document that publicly listed Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are less productive and profitable than publicly listed firms in which the state has no ownership stake. In particular, Chinese listed SOEs are more capital intensive and have a lower average product of capital than...