In this chapter we examine trends in China's household incomes, income distribution and inequality for China as a whole and for each of the urban, rural and rural-urban migrant subgroups, as well as analyzing changes in the income gaps between the urban and rural sectors and among the...

This chapter seeks to throw new light on the emergence of the Chinese economic middle class using data from the China Household Income Project from 2002, 2007, and 2013. We find that between 2002 and 2013 China's income distribution was transformed from a pyramid shape, with a majority having...

The basic canonical model fails to predict the aggregate college premium outside of the original sample period (1963-1987) or to account for the observed deviations in college premia for younger vs. older workers. This paper documents that these failings are due to mis-measurement of the...

The labor market attachment of females has increased dramatically over the last half century, converging to a pattern similar to that of males. Human capital theory predicts an associated increase in human capital investment by females and a convergence in the life-cycle human capital investment...

In the last three decades, Canada and the US showed different paths in per capita GDP growth, skill premiums and inequality. Both firm and worker productivity differences play a role and have different policy implications, but are difficult to distinguish. To examine separate firm and worker...

Economists disagree about the factors driving the substantial increase in residual wage inequality in the U.S. over the past few decades. We identify and estimate a general model of log wage residuals that incorporates: (i) changing returns to unobserved skills, (ii) a changing distribution of...

We develop a dynastic human capital investment framework to study the importance of potential market failures - family borrowing constraints and uninsured labor market risk - as well as the process of intergenerational ability transmission in determining human capital investments in children at...

A large literature studies the wage consequences of over-education in the sense of a worker, by some measure, having a higher level of education than is required for the job. We use unique new data to reexamine the common interpretation that initial over-education represents a harmful type of...

We use novel data to show that the beauty wage premium exists only in jobs where attractiveness is plausibly a productive characteristic. A large premium exists in jobs that require substantial amounts of interpersonal interaction, but no such premium exists in jobs that require working with...

This paper studies wage determination using the first longitudinal dataset containing joblevel task information for individual workers. Novel quantitative task measures detail the amount of time spent performing People, Information, and Objects tasks at different skill levels. These measures...