Yiu Por (Vincent) Chen is an Economist, Labour Market Specialist, at Inclusive Labour Markets, Labour Relations and Working Conditions Branch, Conditions of Work and Equality Department, International Labour Office (ILO), Geneva, Switzerland. Before that he was an Associate Professor at Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong. In addition to his connections with IZA, Professor Chen is a Research Affiliate at UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. He received a PhD from Columbia University in 2004 and a Master degree at Harvard. He specializes in the fields of political economy of development and inequality, economic geography of labor migration and urbanization, labor and development, and institutional economics. His research focuses on the economic, political, and institutional foundations that shape human mobility and development. In particular, he interested in labor policies and labor market institutions in transitional economies. He has been research on the institutional foundation that explains the surge of rural-urban labor migration in the early 80’s, the largest labor migration in human history. In addition to his work on labor issues and development in China, his recent research explores the connections of globalization with labor market institutions, labor mobility and labor relations.
His (co-authored) book (Springer 2008), Social Capital and Business Development in High-technology Clusters: An Analysis of Contemporary U.S. Agglomerations, explores the role of social capital and technical cluster that affects the spatial assimilation of foreign high-tech human capital in the US. His works has been published in American Economic Review, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Regional Studies, Social Science Research, Urban Studies, and World Development. He was an Andrew Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Brown University (2003-4) and was the recipient of best essay competitions award at "Inequality and Poverty in China" conference by UNU-WIDER (2005), the 18th Chinese Economics Association (UK) Annual Conference (2007), the Gregory Chow Best Paper Competition at the Chinese Economists Society (2008), and the Labor and Employment Relations Association Best Paper Award (2010), among other fellowships and essay competitions awards.
He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in September 2008.
