We empirically deconstruct informal employment in China into private business owners and casual workers without job contracts. Survey data from 2007 and 2013 document a rise in informal employment to the point where it exceeds formal employment, potentially an unintended consequence of the 2008...

The rapid growth of informal employment in China in recent decades has attracted attention, but to understand its implications, the concept of informality must be deconstructed. We reclassify employment status into three categories: salaried workers who have long-term contracts; the self-employed;...

In nationally representative household data from the 2008 wave of the Rural to Urban Migration in China survey, nearly two thirds of rural-urban migrants found their employment through family members, relatives, friends or acquaintances. This paper investigates why the use of social network to...

We empirically deconstruct informal employment in China into private business owners and casual workers without job contracts. Survey data from 2007 and 2013 document a rise in informal employment to the point where it exceeds formal employment, potentially an unintended consequence of the 2008...

Most empirical studies on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) use cross-sectional data or case studies, making causality hard to establish. We overcome this limitation by using panel data on Chinese firms. We find no effect of last year's profits on CSR ratings, although their negative...

Summary Survey data from urban China in 2002 show levels of life satisfaction to have been low, but not exceptionally so, by international comparison. Many of the determinants of life satisfaction in urban China appear comparable to those for people in other countries. These include, inter alia,...