Rural Labor Migration, Discrimination, and the New Dual Labor Market in China

This book studies some important issues in China’s labor market, such as rural labor migration, employment and wage discrimination, the new dual labor market, and economic returns on schooling, using the newer and representative data and advanced estimation models. This approach has yielded many interesting results, including a solution to the dilemma of two ongoing crises since 2004: the rural labor surplus and severe shortage of migrant labor. While male workers generally received less favorable treatment and consequently enjoyed a lower average employment probability than female workers in 1996, they also received preferential treatment over female workers, who otherwise had identical worker characteristics in 2005. We provide new estimates for male-female hourly wage differentials in urban China, and our results indicate that the hourly wage differentials and the unexplained part of the hourly wage differentials are smaller than the differentials obtained by ignoring the sample selection bias. We study China’s new dual labor market, which is shifting from a rural migration versus urban workers setup to informal workers versus formal workers setup, and present some interesting results. Our study is the first to adopt the IV methodology and the Heckman (1979) two-step procedure simultaneously for the estimation of economic returns on schooling in China.

Dr. Guifu CHEN is an Associate Professor of Economics at Xiamen University in China. He received his Ph.D. from Kobe University in Japan. His main concern is labor economics and macroeconomics. He has published many papers in refereed journals, such as China Economic Review, China & World Economy, and Journal of Asian Economics.

Dr. Shigeyuki HAMORI is a Professor of Economics at Kobe University in Japan. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University and has published more than 130 papers in refereed journals. He is the author or co-author of An Empirical Investigation of Stock markets: the CCF Approach (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), Hidden Markov Models: Applications to Financial Economics (Springer, 2004), Empirical Techniques in Finance (Springer, 2005), and Introduction of the Euro and the Monetary Policy of the European Central Bank (World Scientific, 2009). He is also the editor of Global Linkages and Economic Rebalancing in East Asia (World Scientific, 2012).