What are the various ways in which local governments in China accommodate migrants through housing policies, and what are the forces that drive these variations? Through systematic coding of policy documents from 97 prefecture-level cities, this study captures the patterns of migrant housing policies using cluster analysis. We found that 18.6 per cent of the cities adopted a residual approach. Most cities adopted a rental-based approach (public and private rental, and collective rental) that could only meet migrants’ short-term housing needs. Only a few cities (12.4 per cent) adopted a citizenship-oriented approach, which best fits the central government's overarching goal of facilitating migrant workers’ long-term settlement in the host cities. Regression analyses examining the determinants of local migrant housing policies showed that the policy variations were not only shaped by economic and political concerns but also the salience of urban issues (problem-solving functions) and previous welfare generosity (path-dependency tendencies).

The generosity of maternity pay has been shown to be an important factor for mothers’ attachment to the labour market. In the UK, we can observe that the generosity of maternity leaves across universities varies greatly: some universities top up the statutory maternity pay with longer and better paid leaves, others are either less generous or only entitle academic women to the legal minimum. We want to understand why this is the case. Therefore, this article examines both theoretically and empirically how higher education employers decide about the generosity of the offered occupational maternity pay. We use a bargaining approach to model the supply and demand side of generous maternity benefits in universities with different characteristics and test the implications with a generalised negative binomial model. We find that universities’ income does not account for this variation while differences in terms of costs and benefits for employers do. Most importantly, our results show that more research intense universities with a higher previous share of female professors provide more generous maternity pay. We offer a range of explanations for these findings.