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The purpose of this paper is to study the dynamic change of the migrant labor market in China from 2002 to 2007 using two comparable data sets.

To understand the factors behind the wage change, the authors use the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition (Oaxaca, 1973; Blinder, 1973) method to study the hourly wage change over this five-year period.

The focus is on the rural-urban migration decision, the wage structure of migrants, the labor market segmentation between migrants and urban natives, and the changes of these aspects from 2002 to 2007. The paper finds that prior migration experience is a key factor for the migration decision of rural household members, and its importance keeps increasing from 2002 to 2007. The results show that there is a significant increase in wages among both migrants and urban natives over this five-year period, but migrants have enjoyed faster wage growth, and most of the increase of wages among migrants can be attributed to the increase of returns to their characteristics. The authors also find evidence suggesting convergence of urban labor markets for migrants and for urban natives during this five-year period.

In order to make the 2002 and 2007 data sets comparable, the authors had to restrict the observations with fixed residence only, and can only include seven cities. These limit the representativeness of the sample. When interpret the findings in this paper, it is important to keep this in mind.

Due to the scarcity of data, there are few studies on the dynamics of the migrating population and the migrant labor market. Since the urban natives and migrants are still segmented in the labor market, the migrant labor market may have its own characteristics, and also, because of the increasing importance of the migrants in Chinese society, knowledge of the evolution of the migrant labor market is crucial for grasping the whole story behind the Chinese economic miracle.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the trend of off-farm employment in rural China over the past four decades since the reform and opening-up.

Using two sets of panel survey data, the China National Rural Survey conducted in 2000 and 2008, and the China Rural Development Survey conducted in 2005, 2008, 2012 and 2016, this study offers a re-visit of China’s off-farm employment to give us the latest information about its evolution and whether rural labor markets have developed in a way that will allow them to facilitate the transformation of China’s economy more effectively. The evolution of off-farm employment is further examined through decomposition of types, destinations, industries, and population sub-groups as well as the change in the wage rate.

The data show the rapid increase in rural labor activities over the whole study period. Most notably, the authors findnd that a rapid rise in off-farm employment has continued even until after 2008 and into the mid-2010s, which is a time when some feared that macroeconomic conditions might keep rural residents on the farm or drive them back to the farm. In the disaggregation of labor market trends, the authors show that labor markets are acting consistently with an economy that is in transition from being dominated by agriculture to being dominated by other forms of production and with a population that is consistently becoming more urban.

The authors believe that the results will contribute positively to the exploration of answers to the question whether or not rural labor markets have developed in a way that will allow them to facilitate the transformation of China’s economy more effectively over the last four decades.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of adult children migration on the health status of elderly parents. Increased labor migration in developing countries that lack adequate social security systems and institutionalized care for the elderly is a phenomenon that is important to understand. When their adult children go away to work, it is not clear what effect there will be on “left-behind” elderly parents.

This study employs nearly nationally representative data from five provinces, 25 counties, 101 villages and 2,000 households, collected from two waves of data in 2007 and 2011. This sample comprises a subset of households which include both elderly individuals (above 60 years old) and their grown (working-aged) children in order to estimate the impact of adult child migration on the health of elderly parents in rural China.

This study finds that adult child migration has a significant positive impact on the health of elderly family members.

These findings are consistent with the explanation that migration raises family resources, which in turn may contribute to better health outcomes for elderly household members.

This is the first paper to attempt to identify the relationship between household migration and the health of elderly parents within the Chinese context.

What this paper aims to tackle is how much did the return of rural migrant labor during the financial crisis affect China's GDP and the growth rate of the national economy.

This paper constructs a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and uses data of China's 2007 Input-Output Table to analyze the impact of the return of rural migrant labor on China's economy during the financial crisis.

The results show that the return of rural migrant labor during the financial crisis had substantial impacts on China's economy. The national GDP decreased by about 0.499-1.463 percent, mainly due to the number of rural labor who migrated from the non-agricultural sector to agriculture. Of the major sectors of economy, the manufacturing, construction and other services sectors were the most affected.

This paper assesses the impacts of return of rural migrant labor during the financial crisis on China's GDP and the growth rate of the national economy.

The aim of this paper is to address a local separability character partly identified by non‐farm participation behaviors in the context of multiple market imperfections.

The paper develops a model to analyze agricultural household's non‐farm participation based on heterogeneous asset endowments. The model is applied to recent data from Zhouzhi, a mountainous county in rural western China.

The paper shows that human capital, social capital and other capital assets have significant but different effects on the agricultural household's participation in non‐farm activities, and they help to break down non‐farm labor constraints. Nonseparability holds only for those households unable to participate in non‐farm activities due to poor asset endowments.

The agricultural household model developed in this paper and its application in China provide insights into theory and empirical analysis of agricultural households' behavior and rural development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine key determinants of farm labor market development in rural China.

Probit, Logit, and IV-Probit model are used to provide pertinent empirical analysis.

Analysis of survey data establishes three facts about the farm labor market in rural China: first, households with high farm endowment are more likely to hire farm labor; second, because of the mismatch between farm ability and land size created by egalitarian land reallocation, households with more land reallocations are more likely to participate in farm labor market to adjust such mismatch; third, land rental market and farm labor market seem to be complementary. These results are robust to alternative model specifications, subsamples, alternative dependent variables, and additional controls. Welfare analysis demonstrates that the farm labor market is conducive to agricultural output.

The main contribution of this study is to lay out stylized facts in terms of the development of farm labor market using a unique survey data set.

Internet data hold many promises for demographic research, but come with severe drawbacks due to several types of bias. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature that uses internet data for demographic studies and presents a general framework for addressing the problem of selection bias in non-representative samples.

The authors propose two main approaches to reduce bias. When ground truth data are available, the authors suggest a method that relies on calibration of the online data against reliable official statistics. When no ground truth data are available, the authors propose a difference in differences approach to evaluate relative trends.

The authors offer a generalization of existing techniques. Although there is not a definite answer to the question of whether statistical inference can be made from non-representative samples, the authors show that, when certain assumptions are met, the authors can extract signal from noisy and biased data.

The methods are sensitive to a number of assumptions. These include some regularities in the way the bias changes across different locations, different demographic groups and between time steps. The assumptions that we discuss might not always hold. In particular, the scenario where bias varies in an unpredictable manner and, at the same time, there is no “ground truth” available to continuously calibrate the model, remains challenging and beyond the scope of this paper.

The paper combines a critical review of existing substantive and methodological literature with a generalization of prior techniques. It intends to provide a fresh perspective on the issue and to stimulate the methodological discussion among social scientists.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impacts of the 2008 economic crisis on the change in income inequality among farm households using the micro‐level data. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using a national household survey data in Taiwan in 2007 and 2009, the paper applies the Gini decomposition method for income inequality.

Results of a decomposition method indicate that the Gini coefficients decrease for farm households, and that the effects are more pronounced among the full‐time farms. The reduction in the overall income inequality is due to the decreased farm income and off‐farm wage salaries, as well as the increased government payments.

Although these findings are interesting and useful, some caveats still remain. First, the analysis can only reveal the short‐term effect of the economic crisis. The long‐term effect could be different. In addition, the paper does not further address whether the impacts may differ for households with different socio‐demographic characteristics of the household members and household characteristics. More detailed information on each household member is required to address this issue. This issue is beyond the scope of the current study and is left for further investigation.

Numerous studies have examined the impact of 2008 economic crisis on the general economy, however, little is known about the effect among farmers. This study is among the first to assess the impacts of financial crisis on income inequality between farm and nonfarm households.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of rural-urban income gap on agricultural growth in China and its dynamics over time and across regions since reform and opening up.

Two types of indices are constructed to measure the rural-urban income gap: the intra-provincial index and the inter-provincial index. A provincial panel data from 1978 to 2010 and growth accounting method are used to estimate the size of the adverse effect of rural-urban income gap on agricultural growth in China.

The empirical results show that both indices of rural-urban income gaps are negatively associated with agriculture output, but the inter-provincial rural-urban income gap produces a larger adverse effect than the intra-provincial rural-urban income gap. Growth accounting analysis further shows that such adverse effects are decreasing over time and are larger in the central provinces. The results represent resource diversion effects of rural-urban income gap on agriculture.

This paper bridges the gap in existing literature on the relationship between sectoral income gaps and agricultural growth, which confirms Schultz's argument that agricultural activities are efficient even in developing countries and the rural resources diverted out by income gap are not surplus. The results imply that equalized rural-urban and regional policies are required to maintain sustainable agricultural growth in China.