Our paper studies the determinants of happiness in China and U.S. and provides a better understanding of the issue of inequalities in happiness beyond income inequality. Based on the two waves of nation-wide survey data on happiness collected by World Values Survey in 1995 and 2007, Probit and...

This paper analyzes changes in the gender earnings gap in urban China over the period 1988–2004 using urban household survey data. The mean female/male earnings ratio declined from 86.3% to 76.2%. Mainly responsible for this diverging trend were rapid increases in returns to both observed...

It is often believed that spouses’ wages are positively related even when other traits such as age and education are controlled. This is mainly based on the observation of two-earner couples. This paper uses the standard sample selection technique to correct for the sample censoring and to...

In this paper a general equilibrium model is constructed to explain the emergence of firms and change in firm size by the tradeoff between economies of specialization and transaction cost. We show that firms emerge from the development of division of labor if the transaction efficiency for labor...