China's new Labor Contract Law, which intended to strengthen the labor protection for workers, went into effect on January 1, 2008. The law stipulated that the maximum cumulative duration of successive fixed-term (temporary) labor contracts is 10 years, and employees working for the same...

This paper exploits a quasi-natural experiment – the U.S. granting of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China after China's accession to the World Trade Organization – to examine whether trade liberalization affects the incidence of child labor in China. PNTR permanently set U.S....

We present the first systematic study on child labor in China. Child labor is not a negligible social phenomenon in China; about 7.74% of children aged from 10 to 15 were working in 2010, and they worked for 6.75 hours per day on average, and spent 6.42 hours less per day on study than other...

This paper evaluates the effect of a free compulsory education reform in rural China on the incidence of child labor. We exploit the cross-province variation in the roll-out of the reform and apply a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the causal effects of the reform. We find that...

China initiated its family planning policy in 1962 and one-child policy in 1980 and allows all couples to have two children as of 1st January, 2016. This paper systematically examines the labor market consequences of China's family planning policies. First, we briefly review the major historical...

The paper studies the levels and changes in wage inequality among Chinese rural-urban migrants during 2002-2007. Using data from two waves of national household surveys, we find that wage inequality among migrants decreased significantly between 2002 and 2007. Our analysis on the wage...

Using a representative sample of rural migrants in cities, this paper investigates where the migrants in urban China come from, paying close attention to intra-provincial vs. inter-provincial migrants, and examining the differences in their personal attributes. We find that migrants who have...

This study analyzes the effect of one-child policy on marriage market in China, and focuses on leftover situation, marriage age, and the age differential between husband and wife. Taking age of 30 as a cut-off point, the one-child policy has increased the leftover proportion about 1.2%, with...

This study investigates the effect of grandparental care on children's locus of control (LOC), which is an important non-cognitive skill that affects children's future development. We use data from the China Family Panel Studies, which is a nationally representative survey, and employ...

Using national representative samples from population census and mini-census of China, this paper documents important employment dynamics in China from 1990 to 2015. The share of routine manual jobs decreased significant from 57% to 32%; both the share of routine cognitive jobs and the share of...