A growing body of literature explores the effect of higher education on the urban–rural divide in China. Despite an increasing number of rural students gaining access to college, little is known about their performance in college or their job prospects after graduation. Using nationally representative data from over 40,000 urban and rural college students, we examine rural students’ college performance and estimate the impact of rural status on students’ first job wages in comparison to their urban peers. Our results indicate that once accepted into college, rural students perform equally as well, if not better, than their urban counterparts. Additionally, we discovered that rural students earn a 6.2 per cent wage premium compared to their urban counterparts in their first job after graduation. Our findings suggest the importance of expanding access to higher education for rural students, as it appears to serve as an equalizer between urban and rural students despite their significantly different backgrounds.

We estimate the wage premium associated with having a cadre parent in China using a recent survey of college graduates carried out by the authors. The wage premium of having a cadre parent is 15%, and this premium cannot be explained by other observables such as college entrance exam scores, quality of colleges and majors, a full set of college human capital attributes, and job characteristics. These results suggest that the remaining premium could be the true wage premium of having a cadre parent.

This paper empirically investigates the labor market effects of China’s 2007 VAT reform, which significantly reduced the tax cost of capital investment. Employing city-by-year variation in the reform, we demonstrate that the tax cuts increased the earnings of skilled workers and left the earnings of the unskilled workers unaffected. Moreover, we find limited impacts of the reform on employment for both skill groups. These results suggest that the tax incentives increased the relative demand for skills, thus resulting in a higher income inequality between skilled and unskilled workers.

China’s college admission increased by five times between 1998 and 2009. While the college premium for young workers declined, that for senior workers increased in this period. In our general equilibrium model, a rising demand for skills (education and experience) explains both trends. A demand shock leads to an expansion in the elastic college enrollment, depressing the college premium for young workers. With an inelastic supply, experienced college graduates continue to enjoy a rising premium. Despite the low immediate premium, young individuals continue to flood into colleges because they foresee high lifetime returns. Simulations match empirical results well.

A country’s national income broadly depends on the quantity and quality of workers and capital. But how well these factors are managed within and between firms may be a key determinant of a country’s productivity and its GDP. Although social scientists have long studied the role of management practices in shaping business performance, their primary tool has been individual case studies. While useful for theory-building, such qualitative work is hard to scale and quantify. We present a large, scalable dataset measuring structured management practices at the business level across multiple countries. We measure practices related to performance monitoring, target-setting, and human resources. We document a set of key stylized facts, which we label “the international empirics of management”. In all countries, firms with more structured practices tend to also have superior economic performance: they are larger in scale, are more profitable, have higher labor productivity and are more likely to export. This consistency was not obvious ex-ante, and being able to quantify these relationships is valuable. We also document significant variation in practices across and within countries, which is important in explaining differences in the wealth of nations. The positive relationship between firm size and structured management practices is stronger in countries with more open and free markets, suggesting that stronger competition may allow firms with more structured management practices to grow larger, thereby potentially raising aggregate national income.

Regional monopoly limits market reforms from improving cross-firm resource allocative efficiency, but little empirical evidence is available from developing countries. This paper provides rich evidence that regional monopoly may hinder the expansion of more productive firms, using the Chinese iron and steel sector as a case. Drawing on a comprehensive panel dataset comprising 11,136 iron and steel firms in China from 1998 to 2009, we demonstrate that market reforms in China's steel industry enhance competition at the national level, but do not effectively improve resource reallocation within provinces. Despite a decline in the market share of the top 10 largest steel enterprises from 80% to 50% between 1998 and 2009, resource reallocation only contributes to 14% of industry-level total factor productivity (TFP) growth, amounting to one-sixth of the contribution from within-firm productivity growth. Furthermore, the effects of resource reallocation within provinces are significantly lower compared to those observed between provinces, suggesting that market fragmentation or frictions hinder the expansion of more productive firms within the same province. These findings underscore the importance of eliminating regional monopoly for developing countries undergoing market reforms to enhance resource allocative efficiency.