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Abstract
The paper studies the levels and changes in wage inequality among Chinese rural-urban migrants
from 2002 to 2007. We use the Chinese Household Income Project dataset and the Rural to Urban
Migration in China dataset to construct a unique dataset that allows us to document changing
wage inequality among migrants and among urban natives between 2002 and 2007. We find that
wage inequality among migrants decreased significantly between 2002 and 2007, whereas it
increased among urban natives during the same period. Our results show that the high-wage
migrants experienced slower wage growth than middle- and low-wage migrants, a primary cause
of declining inequality among migrants. We used distributional decomposition methods, and find
that the overall between-group effect (coefficient effect) dominates in the whole wage
distribution of the migrants, which means that the change in returns to the characteristics
(education and experience) play a key role, but on the upper tails of the wage distribution, the
within group effect (residual price effect) dominates which implies that the unobservable factors
or institutional barriers do not favor the migrants at the top tail of the wage distribution.