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This paper documents the changing impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on gendered wages in urban China. Combining household survey data from 1995 and 2002 with province-level macro-data, the paper finds that FDI as a proportion of investment has a sizable and statistically significant positive effect on both female and male wages in both years. In 1995, women experienced larger gains from FDI than men, but those gender-based advantages had reversed by 2002, with men experiencing larger wage gains from FDI than women. The paper argues that these results reflect the shift of foreign-invested enterprises to higher productivity and more domestically oriented production, a shift that interacts with gender-based employment segregation to more greatly advantage workers in male-dominated than female-dominated industries. These findings indicate that FDI can have considerable structural effects on economies that reach beyond the particular workers and firms linked to foreign investors.China, earnings differentials, foreign direct investment, trade liberalization, JEL Codes: F21, J7, O53,

Drawing on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), David Neumark (2002) finds that living wage laws have brought substantial wage increases for a high proportion of workers in cities that have passed these laws. He also finds that living wage laws significantly reduce employment opportunities for low-wage workers. We argue, first, that by truncating his sample to concentrate his analysis on low-wage workers, Neumark's analysis is vulnerable to sample selection bias, and that his results are not robust to alternative specifications that utilize quantile regression to avoid such selection bias. In addition, we argue that Neumark has erroneously utilized the CPS data set to derive these results. We show that, with respect to both wage and employment effects, Neumark's results are not robust to more accurate alternative classifications as to which workers are covered by living wage laws. We also show that the wage effects that Neumark observes for all U.S. cities with living wage laws can be more accurately explained as resulting from effects on sub-minimum wage workers in Los Angeles alone of a falling unemployment rate and rising minimum wage in that city.

The workplace transformation movement in the U.S. has made rapid progress since its emergence in the early 1980s. A recent survey of manufacturing establishments with at least fifty workers found, for example, that roughly half of the surveyed plants had embarked on experiments with quality circles, work teams, or total quality management techniques (Osterman, 1994, p. 177). Employee involvement schemes, such as quality circles (QCs) and work teams, are being combined with programs, such as total quality management (TQM), to improve product quality and eliminate inefficiencies in production.l Over roughly the same time period that workplace transformation has been advancing, occupational illnesses related to cumulative trauma disorders (e.g., conditions due to repeated pressure, vibration, or motion, such as carpal tunnel syndrome) have also been rising. The rate of cumulative trauma disorders (CTDs) in manufacturing (number of illnesses per 10,000 workers) went from 16.6 in 1984 to 104.6 in 1991. While CTDs accounted for only 18 percent of all occupational illnesses in 1980, by the decade's end this number had grown to 56 percent. Indeed, by the early 1990s, illnesses associated with CTDs resulted in the longest absences from work of all health and safety-related events and exposures (U.S. Department of Labor, 1992, pp. 3, 5). 2 This trend has not escaped the attention of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration which in November 1999 advanced sweeping ergonomic standards designed to address the problem. California has recently adopted ergonomic standards, but the proposed OSHA standards are even more stringent. The proposed federal standards cover 27 million employees and will require 1.6 million employers to disseminate information about ergonomics and to adopt a system for reporting and responding to problems. Is there a connection between these two trends in the workplace? Case study evidence, much of it from Japanese auto transplants in the U.S., suggests that there is. We

This paper presents one of the first quantitative assessments of the effect living wage laws have had on firms covered by their mandate. Applying difference‐in‐difference estimation methods to survey data from Boston, Massachusetts, I find little evidence of reduced employment or hours worked, following living wage implementation. Instead, there is strong evidence that firms actually shifted from part‐time towards full‐time staffing as a result of Boston's living wage law. Estimates also reveal a substantial degree of wage compression within firms who raised wages. Finding no evidence of reduced employment or hours, this paper uses qualitative survey data to examine other ways in which firms may have adjusted to higher wages. I find some evidence that covered firms have taken lower profits as a way to adjust to the Boston law.