Three Essays on the Dynamics of China's Urban Labor Market: Hukou-based Stratification, Size-earnings Relation, and Sector-segmented Mobilit

This dissertation includes three essays to address how institutional reform has reshaped stratification and mobility patterns by creating and reconfiguring the urban labor markets in post-socialist China. The first essay systematically examines inequalities in labor market outcomes among different hukou groups and analyzes how the hukou distinction interacts with economic segmentation structure. The second focuses on the relation between organization size and workers' earnings, and shows how the relation itself and the way in which it is explained by other organizational and individual characteristics change since the mid-1990s. The third essay demonstrates unbalanced increases in various kinds of job mobility across different reform periods and explores the main forces driving the changes.