Social protection, health status, and earnings inequality in Chinese urban labor market

This thesis examines the important role of work sector in workers’ health status and the relationship between health status and workers’ earnings in Chinese urban labor market. Using a panel data, we find that work sector have a significant effect on workers’ health status, due to their different levels of social protection. In particular, workers in the market sector tend to have poorer health status than those in the state sector. These differences, however, are largely limited to male workers and workers without college education. In addition, there is a strong relationship between health status and workers’ earnings in the market sector, indicating that individual health status are more important for workers’ earnings in the market sector that offers less social protection. Such disparities highlight the importance that when studying social stratification and earnings inequality in today’s China, we should pay more attention to health status in addition to conventional measure of human capital. Keywords: social protection, health status, earnings inequality, labor marke