We explore the relationship between the level of village inequality in 1986, and the subsequent growth of household incomes from 1986 to 1999. Using a detailed householdlevel data set from rural China, we find robust evidence that initial inequality is negatively related to subsequent household...

A hedonic analysis of principal-agent employment contracts is developed, in which workers and employers exchange labor services and contractual payment patterns, and is applied to contract data from a household-level survey in rural China in 1935. The results indicate that credit-market...

We use comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. Our overall results are in line with the big picture that is by now familiar from the literature: Exporters are more...

Between 1958 and 1961, China experienced one of its worst famines in history. Birth rates plummeted during these years, but recovered immediately afterwards. The famine-born cohorts were relatively scarce in the marriage and labor markets. The famine also adversely affected the health of these...

Deborah Davis-Friedmann (1991) described the \"retirement\" pattern of the Chinese elderly in the prereform era as \"ceaseless toil\": lacking sufficient means of support, the elderly had to work their entire lives. In this paper we re-cast the metaphor of ceaseless toil in a labor supply model,...

In this paper we measure the distortions in the allocation of labor and capital across provinces and sectors in China for the period 1985-2007. Most existing studies have measured factor market distortions by using some index of dispersion in individual factor returns. However, the map between...