1 论文标题
Economic reform, education expansion, and earnings inequality for urban males in China, 1988–2009
2 作者信息
Xin Meng Kailing Shen Sen Xue
3 出处和链接（比如，NBER working paper No.11000）
http://www.iza.org/conference_files/LabEco2009/meng_x1729.pdf 最新版发布在
4 摘要
In the past 20 years average real earnings of the Chinese urban male workers increased
by 350 per cent. Accompanying this unprecedented growth is a considerable increase in
earnings inequality. Between 1988 and 2007 the variance of log earnings increased from 0.27
to 0.48, a 78 per cent increase. Using a unique set of repeated cross-section data this paper
examines the causes of the increase in earnings inequality. We find that the major changes
occurred in the 1990s when the labour market moved from a centrally planned system to a
market oriented system. The decomposition exercise conducted in the paper identifies the
factor which drives the significant increase in the earnings variance in the 1990s to be the
increase in the within education-experience cell residual variances. Such an increase maybe
explained mainly by the increase in the price for the unobserved skills. When an economy
shift from an administratively determined wage system to a market oriented one, rewards to
both observed and unobserved skills increase. The 2000s saw a slowing down of the reward
to both the observed and unobserved skills due largely to the college expansion that occurred
at the end of the 1990s.