Ultra-precise optical clocks in space will allow new studies in fundamental physics and astronomy. Within an European Space Agency (ESA) program, the "Space Optical Clocks" (SOC) project aims to install and to operate an optical lattice clock on the International Space Station (ISS) towards the end of this decade. It would be a natural follow-on to the ACES mission, improving its performance by at least one order of magnitude. The payload is planned to include an optical lattice clock, as well as a fre-

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In this paper we first explore the effects of differences in labor market institutions and the degree of market liberalization on the size and composition of gender wages gaps in China's urban labor markets. We use enterprise-ownership type, enterprise age, and workers' methods of finding employment as proxies for the extent of market liberalization. We find both the size of the wage gaps and the proportion of the gap left unexplained by differences in productive characteristics largest in the most liberalized (joint venture) sector, and smallest in the least liberalized (state) sector. We next investigate the effects of differences in wage structure on the gender wage gaps. We find that differences in wage structure, in general, and the degree of wage dispersion, in particular, are extremely important in accounting for the larger wage gaps in the joint venture and collective sectors relative to the state-owned sector.

In the present study the way in which the gender wage gap in urban China diers according to marital status, education and occupation, is examined. Married Chinese women experience much larger absolute gender wage gaps than their unmarried counterparts. The proportion of the gender wage gap unexplained by dierences in the levels of productive characteristics is also higher for married women than single women. Gender wage gaps are smaller for more educated women. These ®ndings suggest that occupational segregation is not as important a factor as industrial segregation in accounting for the gender wage gap in China's urban labour markets.