Working Paper
Schooling Inequality, Returns to Schooling, and Earnings Inequality
Human capital models imply that both the distribution of education and returns to education affect earnings inequality. Decomposition of these ‘quantity’ and ‘price’ components have been important in understanding changes in earnings inequality in...
Journal Special Issue
Inequality and Poverty in China
Getting an accurate picture of poverty and inequality trends and patterns in the world’s most populous country is central to understanding changes in global inequality and poverty – these alter significantly when China is included or excluded. China...
Working Paper
Private Returns to Education for Wage-employees and the Self-employed in Uganda
The paper investigates the differences in private marginal returns to education between wage-employees and the self-employed in Uganda, using the Mincerian framework with pooled regression models. We use a two-wave household panel to estimate...
Working Paper
How large is the wage penalty in the labour broker sector?
Public debate on the temporary employment services, or labour broker, sector in South Africa has focused on temporary workers’ wages and benefits. Empirical research is limited: temporary employment services cannot be accurately identified in recent...
Working Paper
Wage Reform, Soft Budget Constraints and Competition
Since the beginning of the Chinese economic reforms in 1978, there has been a series of effort to reform the labour compensation practice in state- owned enterprises to strengthen the link between pay and productivity. Despite the reforms, however...
Working Paper
Pecuniary returns to working conditions in Vietnam
Using matched worker-firm data from three waves of the Vietnam Small and Medium Enterprises data, we examine whether workers are compensated with higher wages for working in vulnerable jobs and unfavourable working conditions. Wage equations indicate...
Working Paper
Spatial Inequality for Manufacturing Wages in Five African Countries
This paper uses data on individual earnings in manufacturing industry for five African countries in the early 1990s to test whether firms located in the capital city pay higher wages than firms located elsewhere, and whether such benefits accrue to...
Working Paper
The Impact of Multiple Imputation of Coarsened Data on Estimates on the Working Poor in South Africa
South African household surveys typically contain coarsened earnings data, which consist of a mixture of missing earnings values, point responses and interval-censored responses. This paper uses sequential regression multivariate imputation to impute...
Working Paper
International Trade, Location and Wage Inequality in China
Models of economic geography predict that transportation costs directly affect demand for goods and the supply of intermediate inputs. One of the reasons that international trade is concentrated in the coastal provinces of China is that they have...
Working Paper
Gender Earnings Differentials and Regional Economic Development in Urban China, 1988-97
Gender earnings differentials in urban China by region and their changes during the first decade of economic reform are examined. It is found that the female–male earnings ratio increased during the early stage of reform. The male earnings premium...
Working Paper
Women and Food Security in South Asia
The food security scenario in South Asia has witnessed rapid progress over the last few decades, yet nutrition outcomes, especially those related to women and children, have failed to keep pace. This paper contends that the role of women in providing...