Differential Rewards to, and Contributions of, Education in Urban China’s Segmented Labor Markets

Margaret Maurer-Fazio and Ngan Dinh

No 508, William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series from William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Abstract: Education’s role in determining worker incomes in China’s rapidly changing urban labor markets is investigated in this paper. Using worker data from a 1999-2000 urban enterprise survey, we examine the effects of education on the current earnings of continuously-employed urban workers, migrants, and laid off but subsequently re-employed workers, as well as on the most recent earnings of laid-off (but not subsequently re-employed) workers. We also decompose the earnings differentials between each of these groups of workers and then assess the contribution of education to explanations of the differentials. The empirical results demonstrate that educational attainment remains an important explanator of earnings differentials between institutionally-differentiated groups of workers in China’s urban labor markets. An interesting hierarchy of returns to education has developed. The education of migrants is generally poorly rewarded. The moderate returns to educational investments of the continuously-employed urban residents rank next. Re-employed urban residents experience the highest rewards to their education, especially those who used a competitive means to find their post-layoff employment. When we assess the earning differentials between groups using the continuously-employed urban residents as the basis of comparison, differences in educational attainments alone contribute between 16 and 52 percent of the explanation of the total inter-group wage gaps.

Keywords: wages; China; unemployment; discrimination; transitional economies; employment determination; labor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J20 J22 J31 J64 J71 O15 O53 P23 P36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2002-06-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-lab and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.wdi.umich.edu/files/Publications/WorkingPapers/wp508.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.wdi.umich.edu/files/Publications/WorkingPapers/wp508.pdf [302 Found]--> https://wdi.umich.edu/files/Publications/WorkingPapers/wp508.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:wdi:papers:2002-508

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series from William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan 724 E. University Ave, Wyly Hall 1st Flr, Ann Arbor MI 48109. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WDI ().