Using 1990, 2000 censuses and a 2010 survey, I examine the economic performance of ethnically Chinese immigrants from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan (CHT) in the U.S. labor market. Since 1990, relative wages of CHT migrants have been escalating in contrast to other immigrants. I show these...

Since China promulgated new minimum wage regulations in 2004, the magnitude and frequency of changes in the minimum wage have been substantial, both over time and across jurisdictions. This paper uses county-level minimum wage panel data and a longitudinal household survey from 16 representative...

This paper presents evidence that since 1980, relative to other immigrants, the earnings of Taiwanese immigrants have grown rapidly as they assimilate into the U.S. economy. Our estimates indicate that the rising returns to education, pre-migration experience and hours worked per week play...

Social scientists are often interested in assessing relative changes between two groups over time, for example, the convergence of black-white wages from 1940 to 1990. In such situations, we need a control group for both treatment groups to remove biases resulting from time trends and unobserved...

Job search procedures are a form of human capital investment in that they involve current investments to enhance future returns, analogous to human capital investments in areas such as education, training and mobility that yield future returns. While the theoretical and empirical literature on...

We use several datasets to study whether son preference prevails in the human capital investment among Chinese rural-urban migrant households. We find that son preference exists among the rural migrants' households and that it caused lower probabilities relative to that of their boy counterparts...

This study uses migrant household survey data from 2008 and 2009 to examine how parental migration decisions are associated with the nutritional status of children in rural and urban China. Results from instrumental variables regressions show a substantial adverse effect of children's exposure...

We use the substantial variation in both the magnitude and frequency of minimum wage changes that have occurred in China since its new minimum wage regulations in 2004 to estimate their impact on wages, wage spillovers, and employment. We use county-level minimum wage data merged with...

This article uses an innovative rural-urban migrant survey to assess how social disadvantage is associated with children's nutritional status in migrant households. Measures of social disadvantage are based on China's hukou system of household registration (designed to limit domestic migration...

The minimum wage has been regarded as an important element of public policy for reducing poverty and inequality. Increasing the minimum wage is supposed to raise earnings for millions of low-wage workers and therefore lower earnings inequality. However, there is no consensus in the existing...