This dissertation presents three separate essays. The first two essays explore the gender wage gap and its dynamics in urban China from 1995 to 2018. The first chapter decomposes the gender wage gap based on the observed wage for workers with a precise measure of the hourly wages. The first chapter examines the observed average gender wage gap in…

The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition (BOD) is a popular method for studying the contributions of explanatory factors to social inequality. The results have often been given causal interpretations. While recent work and this article both show that some types of BOD are equivalent to a counterfactual-based treatment effect/selection bias decomposition,…

The research question for this study is how education level, gender, and social network affect migrant workers' starting income for their first job in China's urban cities. Our objective is to reveal the interplay of education level, gender, and social network in determining migrant workers' income, which are to the core of the current academic…

This paper assesses the impact of the mismatch between a college major and job on college graduates' early career earnings using a sample from China. On average, a major-job mismatched college graduate is found to suffer from an income loss that is much lower than the penalty documented in previous studies. The income losses are also found to be…

This paper attempts to explore the connections between expanding female education and the participation of women in paid employment in Japan, China and India, three of Asia's largest economies. Analysis based on existing data and literature shows that despite the large expansion in educational access in these countries in the last half century,…

Visa policies in the United States restrict job opportunities and job mobility for U.S.-trained PhDs who hold a temporary visa, a group that accounts for 40 percent of newly graduated PhDs in science and engineering. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 (CSPA) allowed Chinese students to be eligible for permanent residence in the United…

The paper estimates the returns to overeducation by the Over-Required and Undereducation (ORU) model. The estimated results indicate that the returns to overeducation are positive, but lower than the returns to required education, which suggests that while overeducated employees' earnings are diminished, they still can benefit from it. The paper…