After 30 years of egalitarian rhetoric and collectivist practice, the introduction of market reforms to rural China entailed obvious risks for policymakers. Increases in average income might not compensate for the inequality generated by market-based income determination. Concern for this possibility may help explain the slow relaxation of administrative control over the allocation of resources like land. In order to evaluate the effect of market reforms, we could begin by comparing the current Gini coefficient to that which prevailed during the collective era (see Louis Putterman [1993] for early evidence). Yet, this might tell us little about the specific impact of market organization on income determination. Government policies, such as collective land ownership, mobility restrictions, and fertility limits cloud the picture. Furthermore, industrialization, though itself a product of the reforms, has changed the basis upon which individuals earn income. Isolating a pure effect of ‘‘market organization’’ is a difficult but important task since many current Chinese policies reflect an ambivalent attitude toward decentralized, market-based resource allocation. We offer a few suggestions on issues that need to be considered as this evaluation proceeds, by exploring current inequality in rural northeast China from the vantage point of the 1930’s. We begin with the observation that the level of inequality is similar in 1995 and 1935, and moreover, that most contemporary inequality exists within villages, as was the case in the 1930’s. We then focus on two institu-

We examine the (sequential) introduction of early retirement provisions to Canada's two public pension plans. These reforms provide a unique opportunity to assess the effect of public pension plan parameters on labor supply behavior, free of the biases that potentially affect the simple time‐series or cross‐section inference presented in many previous studies. We find that the reforms led to an increase in pension receipt but had little immediate effect on labor market behavior. This is due to the fact that men who initially took advantage of the early retirement provisions would otherwise have had limited labor market participation.

We examine the effects of minimum wage legislation in Canada over the period 1975–93. For teenagers we find that a 10% increase in the minimum wage is associated with roughly a 2.5% decrease in employment. We also find that this result is driven by low frequency variation in the data. At high frequencies the elasticity is positive and insignificant. The difference in the elasticity across the bandwidth has implications for the interpretation of employment dynamics as a result of minimum wage policy and experimental design in minimum wage studies. It also provides a simple reconciliation of the “new minimum wage research,” which reports very small negative, or positive, elasticities.