Supplementary Data for “Increasing Returns to Education, Changing Labor Force Structure, and the Rise of Earnings Inequality in Urban China, 1996-2010”

In the main text, we have discussed three large-scale compositional changes in the urban labor force since the mid-1990s: a rapid increase in the share of college-educated workers, a tremendous decline in state-sector employment, and an upsurge in the number of rural migrant workers. In particular, the increase in college-educated workers is mainly a result of the college expansion policy initiated in the year of 1999. Figure S1 depicts these compositional shifts using external data published by National Bureau of Statistics of China (henceforth NBS) and the World Bank. First, the solid line shows the share of people who had finished a three-year college (dazhuan) or above among the urban population at ages 6 and above.1 We can see that the share of college-educated people has increased sharply since the year of 2003, the time when the first “expanded ” cohort of four-year college students graduated. Second, the dashed line exhibits the declining share of state sector workers in urban China since the mid-1990s, when massive SOE downsizing began to take place. Finally, the dot-dash line shows the steep rise in the number of rural migrant workers. We can see that the size of rural migrant workers more than tripled during this period, from below 50 million in 1997 to above 150 million in 2010. [Figure S1 here