The TVP labour market has undergone a great change during the economic reform period. Starting from a fully controlled recruitment system, more employees obtained employment through a more market oriented mechanism. This study applies human capital theory to investigate the impact of this...

Under traditional Chinese socialist ideology, labour is not considered as a commodity, and wages are not viewed as the price of labour. Market oriented economic reform initiated in the late 1970s, however, has brought some changes to this politically sensitive area—pricing and allocation of...

Regional income dispersion is a sensitive issue in China in terms of judging the impact of economic reform. This study looks closely at the issue as to what are the determinants of income variation among households in general, and which are the key determinants of income dispersion among...

Firms with different ownership structure behave differently. Currently there are three major ownership structures in China’s industrial sector: state enterprises, collective enterprises, and private enterprises. Market-oriented economic reform has given great autonomy to firm managers in terms...

This dissertation is a collection of three independent essays in empirical development economics using data from China. In the first two chapters, I examine the determinants of choices within the household. In the first chapter, I estimate the causal effects of total income, relative female and...

Economics

We re-examine the Lewis undermigration by studying a two-sector model in which there is a trade-off between higher productivity in the modern sector and better information in the traditional sector. The consequent presence of well-functioning local insurance markets in the traditional sector and...

We examine the interactions between different institutional arrangements in a general equilibrium model of a modernizing economy. There is a modern sector, where productivity is high but information asymmetries are large, and a traditional sector where productivity is low but information...

Economics

Economics