Glass Ceiling Effect in Urban China: Wage Inequality of Rural-Urban Migrants During 2002-2007

56 Pages Posted: 27 Dec 2016 Last revised: 16 Apr 2023

See all articles by Zhaopeng (Frank) Qu

Zhaopeng (Frank) Qu

Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Zhong Zhao

Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA); Renmin University of China

Abstract

The paper studies the levels and changes in wage inequality among Chinese rural-urban migrants during 2002-2007. Using data from two waves of national household surveys, we find that wage inequality among migrants decreased significantly between 2002 and 2007. Our analysis on the wage distribution further shows that the high-wage migrants experienced slower wage growth than middle-and low-wage migrants – a primary cause of declining inequality of migrants.By using distributional decomposition methods based on quantile regression, we find that overall between-group effect dominates in the whole wage distribution, which means that the change in returns to the characteristics (education, experience and other employment characteristics) plays a key role, but on the upper tails of the wage distribution, the within group effect (residual effect) dominates, implying that the unobservable factors or institutional barriers do not favor the migrants at the top tail of the wage distribution. We also study wage differential between migrants and urban natives, and find that though the wage gap is narrowed, gap at upper wage distribution is becoming bigger. Overall, the results suggest that there exists strong "glass ceiling" for migrants in urban labor market.

Keywords: quantile decomposition, wage inequality, rural to urban migrants, China

JEL Classification: J30, J45, J61

Suggested Citation

Qu, Zhaopeng (Frank) and Zhao, Zhong, Glass Ceiling Effect in Urban China: Wage Inequality of Rural-Urban Migrants During 2002-2007. IZA Discussion Paper No. 10424, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2889670 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2889670

Zhaopeng (Frank) Qu (Contact Author)

Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) ( email )

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Zhong Zhao

Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) ( email )

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Renmin University of China ( email )

Room B906
Xianjin Building
Beijing, Beijing 100872
China

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
34
Abstract Views
359
PlumX Metrics