We use CHIP data from 1995, 2002, and 2013 to investigate inequality in urban household consumption expenditures. Overall inequality in urban household consumption expenditures measured by the Gini coefficient decreased slightly from 0.33 in 1995 to 0.32 in 2002, but it increased to 0.36 in...

In this chapter, using selected rural samples of the CHIP 2002 and CHIP 2013 surveys that cover a total of fourteen provinces, we focus on income and poverty differentiation among Chinese ethnic minorities and changes over time in atypical ethnic regions, that is, outside of China's five...

The purpose of this work is to evaluate the redistributive role of government social security transfers on inequality in China. We attempt to answer two questions. First, does inequality of after-transfer income narrow, compared to that of before-transfer income? Second, given the scale and...

Using the data from the China Household Income Project (CHIP) in 2002, 2007, and 2013, this chapter examines the effects of a series of social policy reforms on the economic distance between the rich and poor in each of the urban, rural, and migrant household sectors. We find that over the years...

Using data from the urban household surveys of the China Household Income Project for the years 1995, 2002, 2007 and 2013, we provide consistent estimates of the gender wage gap in urban China and investigate those factors that have contributed to this gap. Similar to past studies, we find a...

Using data from the China Household Income Project, this study analyzes the effects of minimum wage policy on wage distribution in urban China from 1993 to 2013. Several major conclusions emerge from this research. First, with respect to the effects of the minimum wage on wages for low-wage...

Researchers commonly "shrink" raw quality measures based on statistical criteria. This paper studies when and how this transformation's statistical properties would confer economic benefits to a utility-maximizing decisionmaker, for many asymmetric information environments. The presence of an...

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...

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...