China's economic reform has affected various ownership sectors to different degree. A comparison of gender wage differentials and discrimination among individuals employed in the three sectors - state sector, the collective sector, and the private sector - provides information on the impact of...

This paper formalizes Cheung, Coase, Stigler, and Young's theory of irrelevance of the size of the firm. This theory states that if division of labor develops within the firm, the average size of the firm and productivity go up side by side. If division of labor develops between firms, the...

The paper provides some empirical evidence for the relationship between average firm size and the relative transaction efficiency and per capita income as hypothesized by Liu and Yang in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 42(2) (2000):145-65. The empirical data of 11 industries in...

This paper empirically estimates the returns to membership of the Chinese Communist Party using unique twins data that the authors collected from urban China. Our ordinary least squares estimate shows that being a Party member increases earnings by 28.1 percent, but when we use a...

This paper estimates the returns to membership of the Chinese Communist Party using unique twins data we collected from China. Our OLS estimate shows that being a Party member increases earnings by 10%, but the within-twin-pair estimate becomes zero. One interpretation of these results is that...

Spousal education is correlated with earnings for two reasons: cross-productivity between couples and assortative mating. This article empirically disentangles the two effects by using Chinese twins data. We have two innovations: using twins data to control for the unobserved mating effect in...

In interpreting the positive relationship between spousal education and one's earnings, economists have two major hypotheses: cross-productivity between couples and assortative mating. However, no prior empirical study has been able to separate the two effects. This paper empirically...

This paper empirically estimates the returns to education using twins data that the authors collected from urban China. Our ordinary least-squares estimate shows that one year of schooling increases an individual¡¦s earnings by 8.4 percent. However, once we use the within-twin-pair fixed...

This article investigates why many eligible for welfare do not participate. We show that on-the-job wage-rising potential is the key factor motivating nonparticipation. Although individuals with very low earnings and little wage-rising potential are typically welfare recipients, those with good...