The employment shock of late 2008 in the People's Republic of China (PRC) may have been a product of three different events: (i) the contractionary macroeconomic policies introduced by the government and the central bank in 2007 to slow growth, (ii) the introduction of the new Labor Contract Law...

In the past 20 years the average real earnings of Chinese urban male workers have increased by 350 per cent. Accompanying this unprecedented growth is a considerable increase in earnings inequality. Between 1988 and 2007 the variance of log earnings increased from 0.27 to 0.48, a 78 per cent...

Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have moved into Chinese cities since the early 1990s contributing greatly to economic growth, yet, they are often blamed for reducing urban 'native' workers' employment opportunities, suppressing their wages and increasing pressure on infrastructure and...

This paper studies the policy determinants of economic transition and estimates the elasticity demand for labor in the infant private sector in urban China. We show that a reform that untied access to housing in urban areas from working for the state sector accounts for more than a quarter of...