The present study examines the economic returns to English proficiency for college graduates in Mainland China, paths through which English proficiency may affect earnings, and possible moderation effects and crowding-out effects of English proficiency on other human capital. The analysis...

Purpose – This paper aims to illustrate the trends of income growth and income inequality and examines the dynamics and determinants of income mobility in rural China from 2003 to 2006. Design/methodology/approach – The authors decomposed the Gini coefficient by different sources and...

The unemployment rate is a key indicator of labor market and economic performance. Based on a unique survey, we estimate the unemployment rate at 13.44 percent in 30 provincial capital cities in China in 2007, which is well above the officially announced registered unemployment rate. The...

<title>Abstract</title> This paper examines the impacts of liquidity constraints on economic growth and social welfare by incorporating the role of government expenditure into the overlapping-generations model developed by Jappelli and Pagano in 1990s. In our model, the government can provide funds to the...

This article reports the freedom of expression in China using a unique survey to urban residents in the provincial capital cities. The degree of freedom is measured by the respondents' openness about expressing their opinions about the society, the government and public policies. More than half...

This article examines how a household's consumption rate is affected by its relative income and income inequality within a community. Based on the theory of social status seeking in consumption, we test hypotheses related to these factors using a unique panel data set of rural households in...

In this article, we emphasize that net foreign asset (NFA) is an important indicator that can nicely reflect global imbalance and has not received enough attention. We use a representative data-set to examine how the NFA varies with the development stages of different countries. We also...

Estimation of the number of hidden states is challenging in hidden Markov models. Motivated by the analysis of a specific type of cell adhesion experiments, a new framework based on a hidden Markov model and double penalized order selection is proposed. The order selection procedure is shown to...

In this paper we investigate the relevance of the Balassa-Samuelson effect to the determination of regional inflation in China, for the period 1985 – 2000. To do this, we first construct annual measures of Chinese inflation and industry input on regional and sectoral basis. Then we generalize...