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This paper documents the changes in China's Hukou reform before and after 2014 based on a unique data set of Hukou policy documents from Chinese cities between 2000 and 2016. We construct a Hukou registration index to measure the stringency of local Hukou qualification in Chinese cities. There are four main channels for migrants to get local urban Hukou: investment, home purchase, talent program, and employment. The requirements of the four channels have large variations across different tiers of cities between the two periods of 2000–2013 and 2014–2016. First‐tier and some second‐tier cities set high criteria for local Hukou registration that have become more stringent over time, while other cities have much lower requirements. The point account system for Hukou registration shows that cities have different preferences over workers eligible for local urban Hukou. The quantitative measures developed in this paper can be used to study a variety of topics on the social and economic consequences of labor mobility barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a panel of Chinese cities over the period 2004-2009, we analyze the relationship between the level of economic development and the share of urban employment in small businesses. We find that this relationship can be described by an inverted U-shape. In cities with lower levels of economic development, the restructure of the state sector along with a booming service industry is associated with a higher share of employment in small businesses. On the other hand, in cities with higher levels of economic development, a more vibrant manufacturing sector is related to a lower share of employment in small businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to abundant research on population (re)distribution in China, the dynamics of intra‐urban employment concentration remain poorly understood. Drawing upon firm‐level employment data for 2008 and 2013 at a fine analytic scale, we utilize a two‐stage approach involving nonparametric estimating and proximity‐based threshold setting, persistence score, location quotients, and shift‐share analysis, to investigate spatial and compositional changes of employment centers in Nanjing, an emerging global city in the Yangtze River Delta, China. We observe only a very slight trend in the dispersion of whole employment there, and over 70% of employment was concentrated in the identified centers in 2008 and 2013. Employment in different sectors indicated high spatial heterogeneity and polycentricity, which is associated to a distinctly greater extent with decentralization of manufacturing than with services. Specifically, the boundaries of employment centers ranged from stable in the urban core to highly fluctuating in newly developed urban areas; the sectoral composition of centers exhibited consistency within each center but heterogeneity among centers. We further discussed the relationship between dynamics of employment centers and urban configuration, economic re‐structuring, and local policies that have long determined development direction and employment distribution in Nanjing. We suggest that urban planning should consider diversified land use and dynamic planning of employment centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]