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This paper aims to examine the effect of China’s unique household registration system (hukou) on stock market participation.

In an effort to estimate the effect of hukou on households' financial behavior, we draw on data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and use probit model and tobit model to test the effect of hukou on households stock market participation.

The results are with strong interpretative power over the limited participation of stock market in China-investors living in urban areas with urban hukou are more likely to participate in stock markets and allocate a larger fraction of financial assets to stocks and remarkably robust to a battery of robustness checks. The dual structure of social security caused by the household registration system could explain this result. Furthermore, marriage plays such a role of integrating social resources attached to hukou that only the marriage of individuals with urban hukou could significantly promote households' participation in the stock market. For married families, a household in which both husband and wife have urban hukou has a greater possibility to invest in stocks relative to those with rural hukou.

This paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, much literature focuses on the stock market limited participation puzzle and gives explanations from the perspectives of individual heterogeneity and financial markets. This paper examines the effect of hukou. Such an idea is instructive to some developing countries where residents are treated differently because of the institutional reason. Second, the effects we find are economically meaningful. Our estimates indicate that medical insurance attached to hukou can explain almost 58% of the impact of hukou, which suggests that the key to reforming China's current household registration system is to make welfare separate from hukou. Moreover, homogamy based on hukou widens the gap of households' risky assets, which provides a new view to understand the income gap in the cities of China and the heterogeneous effect of marriage on stock market participation.

The purpose of this paper is to take occupation opportunity as an indicator to examine the impact of hukou on labor market segmentation in China. It estimates the scale of the impact and identifies the way of the impact. Especially, the paper takes hukou uniform reform as an example and tests whether hukou reforms helped in eliminating labor market segmentation.

The data sets this paper adopted are the 2000 Census and 2005 Mini Census data in China. Linear model and Probit model are used in estimating hukou's impact. Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition is used in decomposing the difference in occupation distribution among hukou statuses. DID evaluation method is used in comparing the region with hukou uniform reform and the region without to capture the influence of the reform.

The result shows that occupation segmentation based on hukou significantly exists in urban labor market. Hukou uniform reform improved the occupation opportunity of local rural workers but migrating rural workers were somehow crowded out. Migrating urban workers did not benefit from the reform. To conclude these, the reform released employment segmentation between rural and urban workers within the reformed region but strengthened the segmentation between the local residents and outcomers which could influence future labor source and scale in reformed area.

The paper evaluates the hukou uniform reform's impact on the labor market using an empirical way for the first time and makes concrete policy recommendations based on these findings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of China's official household residential status (hukou) on perceived human resource management (HRM) practices, perceived organizational justice (POJ) and its moderation of the relationship between them.

The data for the study were collected from 775 employees in 36 companies in China. Missing data analysis was conducted in order to identify the pattern associated with personal demographic variables. A one-way between-groups MANOVA was performed to investigate hukou differences in the perceptions of HRM practices and POJ. Confirmative factor analysis was conducted on POJ's three-factor measurement model to examine the distinctiveness of the study variables.

Employees registered as agricultural, i.e. rural, hukou, who have migrated to and found employment in urban areas, perceive HRM practices and distributive and procedural justice less favourably than do non-agricultural, i.e. urban, hukou. It also finds that hukou status moderates the effect of HRM on POJ. The findings therefore are that HRM that differentiates rural hukou and urban hukou results in different impressions of their employing organizations, and that hukou status changes the strengths of the relationship between HRM and employees' perceived fairness in their organizations.

The use of the single data source is more likely to result in common method variance which may bias the strength of the relationships that this study proposed. Moreover, this study contributes to the literature with regard to the moderating effects of personal demographic variables on the relationship between organizational policies and POJ, but hukou is the only personal variable examined and therefore the generalisation of the study's findings may be limited. Future research should examine the moderating effects of other personal factors.

The moderating effect of personal demographic variables has been constantly examined in management and psychology research, but with a focus on employees' work attitudes and behaviour. For example, gender was found to moderate the relationship between organizational commitment and turnover intention. The extent to which personal demographic variables might moderate the relationship between organizational policies and POJ has not hitherto been examined. This study fills this void.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the economic impacts of China’s hukou system and propose the possible direction for future reform.

The study develops a framework to incorporate the hukou system into the economic growth model. Using prefecture city-level panel data covering 241 cities over the period 2004–2016 and applying the fixed effects and instrumental variable regression techniques, the authors investigated empirically the impacts of the hukou system on city economic growth.

The study provides three main findings. First, the city sector conditionally benefits from labour mobility deregulation that allows migrants to work in cities. Second, the hukou system has different impacts on economic growth among cities with different sizes and administrative levels. Third, to offset the costs of providing exclusive public services to the migrants, the big or high-administrative-level cities can use their high-valued hukou to attract the high-skilled migrants, but the small- or low-administrative-level cities do not have this advantage.

This study suggests that the key for further hukou system reform is how to deal with the hukou–welfare binding relationship.

The authors developed a theoretical framework and conducted an empirical analysis on the direct relationship between the hukou system and economic growth to reveal the mechanism of how does the hukou system influence the city economic growth and answer the question of why is the hukou system reform so hard in China. The framework also sheds some lights on explaining the success and failure of the hukou system reforms in the past 40 years.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the adverse selection in participation in the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NRCMS), as well as in outpatient and inpatient service utilization, in Chaoyang, Beijing, China.

Probit model is established to test whether the rural Hukou family member in Combined Household (CH) is statistically different from the Pure Rural Household (PRH) in enrollment in NRCMS. Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) model is adopted to examine the difference in the utilization of outpatient and inpatient between the rural Hukou family members in the two kinds of households.

This paper finds that the rural Hukou family member in CH has more probability to enroll in NRCMS than the counterpart in PRH. In the period of six months, the rural Hukou family member in CH exceeds PRH by 0.73 times in outpatient visit number per capita. The former average spends yuan 157 more in outpatient service and is reimbursed yuan 53 more from NRCMS than the latter. Moreover, on average, rural Hukou family member has no difference in the inpatient service utilization between the two kinds of households in the period of 12 months.

This is the first study to empirically test the adverse selection in China's medical insurance market from the perspective of two different types of households, which are CH and PRH.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of China’s urban segregation caused by hukou restrictions on food consumption.

Based on the 2007–2009 Urban Household Survey data from six China provinces conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the authors adopt a propensity score matching (PSM) method to correct for potential selection bias. A Rosenbaum bounds test is applied to evaluate the sensitivity of the PSM results to unobserved variables.

The results show that holding rural hukou (RHs) reduces the consumption of livestock products and vegetables and fruit by 8.8 and 4.8 percent, respectively. The status of hukou does not affect the consumption of grain and edible oil. Hukou impacts on food consumption are heterogeneous across income levels, with low-income and middle-income households more vulnerable to urban segregation and hukou discriminations. A stronger motivation for precautionary saving and higher welfare expenditures that not compensated by social security lead to the lower food consumption by migrant households with RHs.

This paper advances the research frontier by investigating the impacts of hukou system on the structure of food consumption, which accurately reflects the household welfare.

The main purpose of this study was to develop and test an employability scale in a Chinese context. Moreover, the authors investigated how socioeconomic status indicators (education and occupation of parents, household income and hukou, i.e. household registration location) affect the endowment and development of adolescents' employability skills in China.

Data were collected via paper-based surveys from 1,146 vocational school students in rural and urban areas in China at two points in time one year apart. The authors developed a scale to measure employability skills in China and conducted general linear modeling to test the hypotheses.

The findings indicate that adolescents whose parents have more education, highly skilled occupations, relatively affluent household income and urban hukou are more likely to attain higher employability skills than those from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds. Moreover, adolescents with these background characteristics tend to improve their employability skills more than those without such characteristics. This suggests that social capital may further widen the inequality gap among adolescents.

The framework of employability skills focuses on the general basic transferable employability skills of vocational students. Future studies could develop measures of employability skills for college graduates and widen the measurements of social capital based on the study’s findings. The findings suggest that higher education institutions should be encouraged to integrate resources to improve education inequality between rural and urban regions to the disparity in adolescents' employability skills development.

Building on Western frameworks, the study defines and develops an employability scale in the Chinese context that can be a practical measurement tool for researchers, educators and policymakers. The authors investigated the endowment and development of employability skills in relation to social capital. Exposure to social capital tends to affect an individual's skills and capability development at an early stage, and in the long term, this calls attention to access to quality education between rural and urban youth.

This paper has three purposes. First, it aims to explore important factors in the Chinese employment market. Second, it aims to find whether recruiters and applicants understand each other's expectations. Third, it aims to find whether applicants with different Hukou (locals vs non‐locals) have different expectations on position/organization characteristics and whether recruiters from organizations of different ownerships (foreign vs state‐owned) have different expectations on applicant qualifications.

A list of 15 applicant qualifications items and 15 position/organization characteristics items that are relevant in the Chinese context were generated by interviewing ten applicants and recruiters. Then 141 college graduates and 44 recruiters were surveyed in four job fairs in Beijing, and asked them to rank the importance of position/organization characteristics and applicant qualifications.

The study found that recruiters overestimated applicants' expectations on extrinsic rewards (e.g. salary) but underestimated their needs on intrinsic rewards (e.g. job security). Applicants overestimated recruiters' expectations on exogenous qualifications (e.g. local Hukou) but underestimated their expectations on endogenous qualifications (e.g. analysis skills). Local applicants have higher expectations on job locations and voice opportunities while non‐local applicants have higher expectations on local Hukou quota. Recruiters from foreign organizations have higher expectations on endogenous qualifications than recruiters from state‐owned organizations.

The applicant samples were college graduates in Beijing, and the findings may not be generalized to the whole job applicant population in China.

This paper represents an early attempt to investigate both recruiters' and job applicants' expectations at the pre‐employment stage in the contemporary Chinese context, and it provides practical suggestions to recruiters, students, and policy makers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategic responses of multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiaries in China toward a unique institutional characteristic – the structural discrimination against rural migrant workers.

Based on surveys of 181 firms and 669 rural migrant workers, as well as a case study of eight firms in Jiangsu and Shanghai, the authors examined and compared the human resource management (HRM) policies of MNE subsidiaries and domestic Chinese firms toward rural Chinese migrant workers.

This study found that MNE subsidiaries are more likely to accept local discriminatory HRM practices when managing migrant workers. In response to the institutional environments of host countries, MNE subsidiaries tend to share similar behavioral characteristics with local firms and are reluctant to show leadership in initiating institutional change in host countries.

This study is important since it enables investigation of some prevailing assumptions in the literature. Contrary to common wisdom that MNEs are change agents that proactively engage in institutional entrepreneurship in host countries, this study found that MNEs’ responses to the institutional environment of host countries are shaped by their entry modes and the institutional environment in their home countries. MNEs are as diverse as their home countries and far from forming a unified organizational field with similar behavioral characteristics.

Examines China’s population movement since the 1980s. The analysis tackles two types of migration: permanent with corresponding transfers of the household registration, and temporary without such transfers. The study finds that, while the reform has brought about a proliferation of temporary migrants, numbers of permanent migrants have been rather stable. Of temporary migrants, an increasing proportion has been made up by urban residents. Temporary migrants as a whole are more likely to conduct inter‐provincial migration than their permanent counterparts. Coastal provinces and a few northwest provinces have been the favored destinations for temporary migrants. Cities, especially large cities, are preferred by both permanent and temporary migrants. The attraction of towns has been weak and tended to decline. The findings suggest that the reform has not led to a significant change in the formality of permanent migration. The large‐city oriented flow of the overall migration has been contrary to the state urbanization strategy which prioritizes the development of small cities and towns.