Labor Market and the Native-Immigrant Wage Gap: Evidence from urban China

Yang Liu () and Keisuke Kawata

Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI)

Abstract: By developing a model based on recent wage theories, we examine workers' wage determination, considering not only human-capital related factors but also the labor market. We also consider the price level using a city-specific consumer price index. Data come from a national survey in China, while unlike previous studies that examine temporary rural-urban migrants in China, we concentrate on permanent rural migrants who have obtained an urban household registration. We find that considering the effects of the labor market is important in examining workers' wage determination. The decomposition result shows that different effects of market tightness and unemployment benefits are the two primary reasons for the wage differential between the two groups, whereas education does not contribute to the wage gap. As a policy implication, our results indicate that supporting the workers' ability to adapt to the labor markets could reduce wage inequality.

Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-mig, nep-tra and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/15e142.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eti:dpaper:15142

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion papers from Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by TANIMOTO, Toko ().