Does Guanxi matter to nonfarm employment?:

Because land is scarce, farmers in China increasingly have to rely on nonfarm activities to enhance their incomes. The functioning of rural nonfarm labor markets is therefore crucial in determining who has access to nonfarm employment. Previous studies have identified human capital as a key factor determining the selection of workers in the rural nonfarm economy. Using a detailed household survey of northern and northeastern China, this paper shows that guanxi (social networks), has also played an important role. With limited nonfarm job opportunities and poor market information, farmers with better social contacts are more likely to obtain nonfarm jobs. Moreover, guanxi has a larger effect on the nonfarm employment opportunities of male workers than female workers.Employment, Nonagricultural Rural areas China., Social networks China.,

Sensing Coherent Phonons with Two-photon Interference

Detecting coherent phonons pose different challenges compared to coherent photons due to the much stronger interaction between phonons and matter. This is especially true for high frequency heat carrying phonons, which are intrinsic lattice vibrations experiencing many decoherence events with the environment, and are thus generally assumed to be incoherent. Two photon interference techniques, especially coherent population trapping (CPT) and electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), have led to extremely sensitive detection, spectroscopy and metrology. Here, we propose the use of two photon interference in a three level system to sense coherent phonons. Unlike prior works which have treated phonon coupling as damping, we account for coherent phonon coupling using a full quantum-mechanical treatment. We observe strong asymmetry in absorption spectrum in CPT and negative dispersion in EIT susceptibility in the presence of coherent phonon coupling which cannot be accounted for if only pure phonon damping is considered. Our proposal has application in sensing heat carrying coherent phonons effects and understanding coherent bosonic multi-pathway interference effects in three coupled oscillator systems

Rethinking China's underurbanization: An evaluation of its county-to-city upgrading policy

"It has been argued in the literature that China is underurbanized in large part because of restrictions on migration. While the presence of migration barriers can help explain why existing cities fail to achieve their optimal size, it cannot explain the lack of cities. Although migration has become much easier over time, the number of cities in China has been rather stagnant. In this paper, we argue that lack of appropriate mechanisms for creating new cities is another reason for underurbanization. Under China's hierarchical governance structure, the only way to create new cities is through the centralized policy of upgrading existing counties or prefectures into cities. However, in practice the implementation of the county-to-city upgrading policy was more complicated than expected. Based on a county-level panel dataset, this paper shows that jurisdictions that were upgraded to cities prior to 1998 do not perform better relative to their counterparts that remain to be counties in terms of both economic growth and providing public services. The policy was retracted in 1997, freezing the number of county-level cities since then. This, in turn, contributes to the observed underurbanization." from authors' abstractUrbanization, City creation, Governance structure, Political centralization, Development strategies,