An Empirical Research On Gender And Huji Differential In Chinese Urban Labor Market

Since reform and opening up, there appeared differences between many groups in Chinese urban labor market, this article focuses on differences in gender and huji, and the gender difference not only about urban workers but also includes floating population. Given the conditions of human capital, the main reason for differences between groups is that different groups was subjected to differential treatment. To some extent this effects can be attributed to labor market discrimination. Labor market discrimination not only seriously damaged the interests of groups which was discriminated against, but also weaken the market mechanism in the allocation of human resources and influenced the health of a country's economy as well as social harmony and stability.At present, the researches with regard to difference between these two groups are not comprehensive enough, most of which merely concerned about the wage differentials by gender and huji, overlooking groups difference in terms of employment, rate of return to human capital, career promotion and labor force participation and so on. In addition, the research methods are somewhat outdated, most of the researches used the traditional Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method.Compared with previous studies, the main contribution of this paper is embodied in the contents of the study more comprehensive and the novelty of the method. In addition to the study in the wage differentials between groups, the differentials in employment, the return to human capital also have been studied. In a word, this thesis studys five issues of the differences between gender and huji in-depth, which are the gender differences in wages, employment, human capital returns of urban workers, the gender differences in wage in floating population and the wage gap between urban and rural workers. On method, this paper uses Brown decomposition which takes into account occupational differences to study the gender wage differentials, obtaining more reliable conclusions and much richer information than before, and uses an extension of the Oaxaca - Blinder decomposition technique to the logit models to study the gender differentials in employment between urban workers.Using 2002, 2003 Urban Household surveys (UHS) data, 2002 Chinese Household Income Project(CHIP) data and the latest enterprise employee data of Zhejiang, this paper implements the empirical analysis on the above five questions. The main findings of this paper are followings. (1) Regardless of urban workers or floating population, there exits large wage gap between gender, women at a relative disadvantage in the labor market. Using Brown decomposition, we find most part of the wage differential between gender is attributed to discrimination. (2) The employment rate of male workers is higher than female by 6.53 percentage points in urban workers. Through regression analysis we find these results. First, as a whole, being male, younger, better educated, healthy, communist party member, and spouse's employment increases the probability of being employed. Second, family-related background characteristics have different impact on female and male. Third, using an extension of the Oaxaca - Blinder decomposition technique to the logit models, the results show that labor market structural issues explain almost all of the observed gender gap in employment, and the effect of the gender gap in individual endowments is very small. (3) Most studies show that there exists significant discrimination against female workers in the Chinese urban labor market. However, studies also show that the returns to schooling are higher for women than for men. Regarding such contradictory evidence, this paper assumes that women's education can increase female wages not only by enhancing their productivity which works in the same way to men, but also by reducing the discrimination against women in the labor market. Such additional effect provided by the education to women makes female education returns higher than men. Using 2003 Chinese Urban Household surveys (UHS) data, we validate this hypothesis. (4) Using the latest enterprise employee data of Zhejiang to examine the impact of human capital on huji discrimination, we find that 80% of the total huji wage differentials can be interpreted by the differences of individual characteristics and 20% the effects of the discrimination, and the discrimination mainly occurred in the higher school worker group which is much higher than in the secondary worker group. This finding indicates the assumption that education can reduce the unexplained gap is not approved well in the question of Chinese huji wage differentials.