Shing-Yi Wang

Credit Constraints, Job Mobility, and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a Property Reform in China

This paper provides new evidence on the impact of private property rights and employer-provided housing on entrepreneurship. I find an increase in self-employment following a reform in urban China that allowed state employees who were renting state-owned housing the opportunity to buy their homes at subsidized prices. I develop a model of job choice to test two mechanisms that might explain how the reform increased entrepreneurship. I find evidence that the reform reduced labor mobility costs and alleviated credit constraints by allowing households to capitalize on the value of the real estate.

Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates

By exploiting a reform in the United Arab Emirates that relaxed restrictions on employer transitions, we provide new estimates of the monopsony power of firms over migrant workers. Our results show that the reform increased incumbent migrants’ earnings and firm retention. This occurs despite an increase in employer transitions and is driven by a fall in country exits. While the outcomes of incumbents improved, the reform decreased demand for new migrants and lowered their earnings. These results are consistent with a model of monopsony in which firms face upward-sloping labor supply curves for both new recruits in source countries and incumbent migrants.

Statistical Discrimination, Productivity and the Height of Immigrants

Building on the economic research that demonstrates a positive relationship between height and worker ability, the author compares wage returns to height for immigrants and for natives to explore possible explanations for the positive wage–height gradient. Using multiple data sets, the article presents a robust empirical finding that the wage gains associated with height are almost twice as large for immigrants as for native-born individuals. This wage relationship occurs because the productivity gap between tall and short immigrants is greater than the productivity gap between tall and short native-born workers. The author next tests for the possibility that in the relative absence of other sources of information about immigrants, employers place more importance on height for immigrants than for native-born individuals. The evidence does not support the hypothesis of statistical discrimination based on height.