5The China Urban Labor Survey comprises three repeated cross-sectional surveys (2001, 2005, and 2010) conducted in five large urban areas (and a sixth was added in 2010). The survey includes local resident and migrant samples drawn from a geographic-based sampling frame in each city based on dwellings (which are not necessarily household units).

6Unlike the Rural to Urban Migration in China and Indonesia data source, researchers using these data have a clear understanding of the population from which the sample is drawn. These data sources aim to draw a representative sample of rural households, which will provide a representative characterization of rural migrant labor as well.

7The share of the migrant workforce losing employment with this shock depends on how one defines a migrant, and even different publications from the National Bureau of Statistics using the same data source define them differently. At year-end 2008, Chen (2010) projects that the migrant labor force was 225 million rural registered residents, but this number includes migrants working for any amount of time outside of home villages. Migrants may be more or less permanent. Other work using the rural household survey of the National Bureau of Statistics suggests that there were 142 million rural migrants employed long term (for more than six months) outside their home villages at the end of 2008 (NBS 2010).

8An exception is Wang et al. (2009), which suggests that workers from poorer regions shifted more quickly back into agriculture or local nonagricultural employment, so that by June 2009, there was only a 4 percent drop in employment among workers from China’s poor areas.

9The China National Rural Survey (CNRS) dataset includes information from 58 randomly selected villages in six provinces of rural China representative of China’s major agricultural regions (it is “national” under the assumption that these six provinces are nationally representative). The provinces are Hebei, Hubei, Lioaning, Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Zhejiang. Within province, sampling was stratified by county income quintile (as measured by gross value of industrial output) with one county chosen per income quintile. Within each county, two villages were randomly selected, and then survey teams used village rosters to select 20 households per village. A total of 1,160 households were sampled in 2008, which were the same households in the original 2000 survey less 40 households in two earthquake-damaged villages of Sichuan.

10One weakness of this approach is that the counterfactual assumes that prior trends in the growth of migrant employment would continue in the absence of the crisis. Given that it may have taken time for the full effects of the 2008 labor contract law to be felt, this counterfactual may be based on an overly optimistic assumption of migrant employment growth, especially since the years just before the crisis were years of high employment growth.

11Readers familiar with the conventional categories of unemployment, employment, and labor force participation may at first wonder at the usefulness of categories of _laid-off workers_ , _newcomers,_ and _delayed entrants_ used in this analysis. It is important to remember that workers laid off from off-farm either found employment in agriculture or were engaged in household tasks. In this sense, an unemployment and labor force participation rate make little sense as workers are still fully employed but not in off-farm activities. The framework used by Huang et al. is intended to pick up the gross shock to employment off-farm.

> 12Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (2009): _Notice on Reducing Enterprise Burdens and Stabilizing Employment_ .

13Circular “Implementation of Special Vocational and Skills Training Programs,” Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, January 7, 2009.

14No. 1 Document of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Each year, the No. 1 Document addresses the top concern and work priority. The centrality of migrant employment in the February 2009 document suggests recognition that migrants bore the burden of adjustment in the wake of the crisis.

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