UGOD Seminar | Labor market regulation and local-migrant wage gap in China: evidence from the 2008 Labor Contract Law
Supporting the below United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:支持以下聯合國可持續發展目標：支持以下联合国可持续发展目标：
The Chinese labor market had seen changing levels of labor market informality in the past decades. Rural migrant workers are more likely to be employed in the informal labor force and earn lower wages. This study bridges two lines of scholarship that separately consider the roles of migration and informal employment in social stratification in China to investigate the effects of labor market regulation on the local-migrant wage gap. This research tests whether and how the 2008 Labor Contract Law --- a specific public policy aimed at providing labor protection --- affected migrants’ disadvantages in earnings compared to local urban workers during 2006 and 2015. I combine survey data with administrative records to capture place- and time- specific variation in policy implementation. In the short run, the enforcement of the law enlarged local-migrant wage gap after the implementation of the law, because the law disproportionately benefited local workers by improving labor contract coverage more for local workers than for migrant workers. In the long run, the law had little effect on local-migrant wage inequality. These findings shed light on the unintended consequences of labor market regulation on economic inequality.
Yiyue Huangfu is an assistant professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, School of Humanities and Social Science. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She is a social demographer with interests in migration, social stratification, and population aging. Much of her current work focuses on the causes, consequences, and contingencies of internal migration in China. Her work has appeared in the Population Research and Policy Review, Demographic Research, PNAS Nexus, and Population Studies.