Empirical evidence about income convergence among regions and countries is inconclusive and it is necessary to clarify the economic and institutional conditions for convergence. We investigate movements in the income distribution among regions in an integrated market with high mobility of labor,...

Together with the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, there has been a growing divide in the earnings of urban and rural residents. In this paper we focus on China's household registration system, or "hukou", as a potential source of the earnings gap. Using multiple waves of data from the...

Concentration to disadvantaged neighbourhoods may hinder immigrants' opportunities for social integration, so equal chances of translating available economic resources into mobility to less disadvantaged neighbourhoods are important. This paper adds to existing research on exits from poor...

This paper examines two issues associated with the impact of migration on household income and poverty. First, existing studies have typically overlooked a feature of migration that should be taken into account in estimating its impact, namely the fact that migration changes the size of the...

The minimum wage has been regarded as an important element of public policy for reducing poverty and inequality. Increasing the minimum wage is supposed to raise earnings for millions of low-wage workers and therefore lower earnings inequality. However, there is no consensus in the existing...

This paper assesses regional inequality in urban China. It predicts earnings for each worker in multiple provinces, compares provinces of residence and maximum predicted earnings, and estimates predicted relocation gains. It presents a reference comparison for the U.S. in 1940. Only 7.4% of U.S....

This paper develops a spatial equilibrium model to quantify the distributional impacts of international trade in an economy with intra-national trade and migration costs. Focusing on China, I find that international trade increases both the between-region inequality among workers with similar...

Participation in the informal economy has skyrocketed in China, coinciding with emerging labour markets that are segmented along lines of ethnicity, gender and migrant status. While a large body of literature examines migrant and female outcomes in the labour market, minority outcomes are much...

This paper studies the impact of income inequality on the subjective well-being of different social groups in urban China. We classify urban social groups according to their hukou status: rural migrants, quot;bornquot; urban residents, and quot;acquiredquot; urban residents who once changed...