The Empirical Study on the Urban-Rural Income Gap in China
Huafu Shen, Pei Mao

Abstract
This paper tries to use the counterfactual decomposition method to study the urban-rural income gap via quantile by adding some factors, such as Chinese characteristic like height and social status. We find education, gender, and age are still the influence factors of urban-rural income, and also are significant influence in each quantile. After introducing the height and social status, we found that the coefficient of height from the urban residents was not significant. However, social status has a positive influence on the low-income and middle-income urban residents, and high-income rural residents, indicating that the urban and rural areas have different views on social status. In the decomposition of income gap, the coefficient effect explains most causes of urban-rural income gap. But the tendency of characteristics effect is consistent with that of the total effect.

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