Drawing on a survey of migrants in 12 cities across four major urbanising areas in China, this paper analyses rural migrants’ intention for permanent urban settlement. We focus on one sizeable but often overlooked group of rural migrants, that is, the self-employed. Our hypothesis is that...

type="main" <p>This essay draws on an original cross-sectional survey of 1,010 children and their guardians in highly migratory regions of Anhui and Jiangxi provinces located in China's interior. It uses propensity score matching, a technique that mitigates endogenity, to examine the impact of...</p>

By analyzing the evolution of local governments' roles in different periods of China's growth in transition, this paper explores local fiscal incentives to use subsidized land and infrastructure as a key instrument in regional competition for manufacturing investment after the mid-1990s. We...

Rural-urban migration and housing for the urban poor have attracted worldwide attention from both scholars and policy makers. In China, empirical studies have revealed tremendous discrimination experienced by temporary migrants in the urban housing system, but most have emphasized constraints by...

China's fiscal arrangement in the 1980s has preserved local governments' incentive but the 1994 fiscal reform recentralized revenues. Since then, farmers' tax burdens have risen steeply and become a major challenge to the state legitimacy. How to account for the huge regional variation? Why were...

Financial liberalization in China has begun to allow more flexibility in bank interest rate setting but may threaten bank profit margins. This paper documents the initial response to the June 2012 initiative that, for the first time, allowed Chinese banks to meaningfully depart from the...