This paper concerns employment and wage determination in the state industrial sector in China during the period preceding market-oriented economic reforms. We argue that in that period, the sector as a whole faced an effective cost of labor that was increasing in employment. We present a...

Wage structures in transition economies usually diverge significantly from their centrally-planned predecessors. Using a matched sample of employees and enterprises, we examine the effects of privatization on wage structures in rural industry in two provinces of China. We find that privatization...

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of the reasons why women endure longer unemployment durations than men in post-restructuring urban China using data obtained from a national representative household survey. Rejecting the view that women are less earnest than men in their desire...

This paper uses a new data set of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms to evaluate the effects of labor downsizing on firms' technical efficiency, financial performance, and employee wages. Since downsizers and non-downsizers differ greatly in firm characteristics, we use...