人口老龄化必然导致资本替代劳动吗

经济学理论认为,人口老龄化会导致劳动力成本上升,从而改变企业的要素结构、通过资本替代劳动的方式应对,但不同类型的企业对老龄化做出的反应可能存在差异,需要进行深入分析。文章利用中国工业企业数据对上述问题进行了研究,实证结果显示：整体来看,人口老龄化显著提高了企业的资本劳动比,但资本劳动比的上升并不一定表现为资本对劳动的替代。在规模较大、融资约束较轻的企业,老龄化促使其用固定资产投资替代了劳动,但在规模较小和融资约束程度较为严重的企业,人口老龄化并没有显著提高其固定资产投资,只是缩小了其劳动力雇佣规模,说明企业规模和融资约束是影响企业要素结构升级的重要因素。此外,文章还发现人口老龄化主要促使企业利用资本替代低技能劳动力,而人口老龄化的资本替代劳动效应在资本密集型、生产率水平较高和非出口企业中更为显著。文章从微观企业投资视角拓展了人口老龄化的经济效应的研究范畴,并通过规模效应和融资约束角度分析了制约工业企业提高智能化生产程度的因素,从而对传统的见解提供了有益的补充。文章的研究结论能够为政府制定积极应对人口老龄化和助力企业要素结构升级的相关政策提供经验证据的支持。     

“凿空之旅”泽万民:“一带一路”对外直接投资如何提高劳动收入份额

文章基于2003-2016年中国上市公司数据,采用倾向得分匹配和双重差分法（PSM-DID）探讨"一带一路"沿线对外直接投资与母国劳动收入份额之间的因果关系。实证发现,企业对外直接投资长期内整体上提高了职工的工资份额。考虑企业所处地区、行业和劳动者的异质性后,结论仍然稳健。具体而言,企业通过对外直接投资的逆向技术溢出提高了创新能力、研发投入和全要素生产率,从而提高了母国职工工资份额。此外,企业的技术进步具有高技能劳动力的偏向性,母国高技能劳动者的工资份额在企业对外直接投资中得以显著提升,但对于母国低技能劳动者的工资份额影响不显著。文章研究发现"一带一路"沿线对外直接投资对母国劳动收入份额的影响机制和具体效应提供了微观证据。     

Return migration and Hukou registration constraints in Chinese cities

This paper documents the patterns of return migration and labor mobility constraints in China using two unique data: the 2017 China Household Finance Survey and a newly developed urban Hukou registration index. The size of return migrants is larger than that of migrants without local Hukou registration. Majority of return migrants move from more developed region back to their less developed home town where they have Hukou registration. Empirical results show that Hukou registration barrier, typically higher in more developed cities, leads to a higher probability of returning among low-skilled migrant workers, and such an effect only exits among migrants moving across provinces and migrants with rural Hukou.     

The impact of foreign direct investment in China on employment adjustments in Taiwan: Evidence from matched employer–employee data

Using a unique matched employer–employee dataset on Taiwanese manufacturing, we examine the impact of foreign direct investment in China on domestic employment adjustments controlling for firm and worker heterogeneity as well as for potential endogeneity of firms’ expansion in China. Our findings suggest that workers employed at firms with higher levels of investment in China are more likely to leave the firm, compared with workers at firms with zero or lower levels of investment in China. We provide evidence that foreign expansion in China decreases worker employment security at parent companies, particularly for low-skilled workers. Employment adjustments through employer-to-employer transitions are found to be highly associated with wage losses, with the strongest wage effects for low-skilled workers who shift employment between industries. Moreover, we find no evidence that FDI in China contributes to skill upgrading at parent companies.     

The effect of urban cultural diversity on the entrepreneurship of rural-to-urban migrant workers

This paper studies the effect of urban cultural diversity on the entrepreneurship activities of rural-to-urban migrants in China. Merging nationwide data from two different sources, we construct the city index of cultural diversity and explain the entrepreneurial behavior of migrant workers from the perspective of culture. We find robust evidence that urban cultural diversity significantly increases the probability of rural-to-urban migrant workers undertaking entrepreneurial activities, and the effect is larger for necessity entrepreneurship. Compared with intraprovincial migrant workers, urban cultural diversity has a greater effect on interprovincial migrant workers. We also find that the effect of urban cultural diversity on migrant workers who work in the eastern region and highly developed cities is significantly larger. The mechanism analysis suggests that innovation resource accessibility and social inclusion explain the increase in the entrepreneurship engagement of migrant workers produced by urban cultural diversity.     

Unintended consequences of China's new labor contract law on unemployment and welfare loss of the workers

China's new Labor Contract Law, which intended to strengthen the labor protection for workers, went into effect on January 1, 2008. The law stipulated that the maximum cumulative duration of successive fixed-term (temporary) labor contracts is 10 years, and employees working for the same employer for more than 10 consecutive years are able to secure an open-ended (permanent) labor contract under the new law, which is highly desirable to employees. However, in order to circumvent the new Labor Contract Law, some employers may have dismissed workers, after the passage of the new law, who had worked in the same firm for more than 10 years. Using data from the 2008 China General Social Survey, we find strong evidence that firms did in fact dismiss their formal-contract employees who have been employed for more than 10 years. Additionally, using a regression discontinuity design based on this exogenous change in unemployment status for this particular group of workers, we show that the dismissed workers suffered significant welfare loss in terms of happiness. Our results are robust to various specifications and placebo tests.     

The value-added tax reform and labor market outcomes: Firm-level evidence from China

The tax incentives designed to stimulate firm investment may have a large and unexpected impact on labor market outcomes. Using a comprehensive data set on Chinese manufacturing firms during the period 1998–2007 with a difference-in-differences approach, we examine the impact of the value-added tax reform in 2004 on the firm-level labor market outcomes. We find that firms in eligible industries and pilot regions (treated firms) enjoying lower costs of purchasing fixed assets under the reform tended to increase capital investment and reduce employment simultaneously relative to firms that did not have tax incentives (the control firms). Compared with the control firms, the treated firms became more capital intensive but had declines in labor share in value added and average wage. We also find that the employment adjustment is associated with increase in the share of skilled workers in terms of engineers and technicians, but not workers with a college degree or higher.     

Multinationals, skills, and wage elasticities

The increase in foreign direct investments raises concerns about labor market consequences in many countries. It is feared that multinational firms are inclined to shift jobs abroad and increase job volatility. We use firm-level data to examine if multinationality and foreign ownership affect the wage elasticity of labor demand. Unlike previous studies, we distinguish the effect on different skill groups of employees. We find no general difference in wage elasticity between foreign and domestic firms but the wage elasticity is higher in multinational firms than in national firms, in particular for medium-skilled workers.     

Labor migration and problems of innovative development

The negative effects of the current process of labor migration in Russia are analyzed in this article. It is proposed to limit the migration of low-skilled labor by means of setting quotas and to make the number of labor migrants contingent upon the direct investment in high technology from countries that export labor.     

Growth led by human capital in big cities: Exploring complementarities and spatial agglomeration of the workforce with various skills

In cities, complementarity between a low-skilled and a high-skilled workforce can promote each other to improve labor productivity. In this study, we used earlier census data and 1% population survey data to examine the distribution of the skilled workforce in cities in the People's Republic of China (PRC) along with its changes, and drew the following three conclusions. First, a highly skilled workforce is the engine of urban development, increasing urban wages and population. Second, big cities can promote complementarity between skill sets so that there are greater numbers of high-skilled and low-skilled workers in those cities. This explains why both low-skilled and high-skilled workforces agglomerate in big cities. Last, complementarity between the low-skilled and high-skilled workforce is inhibited in the PRC's cities because of the biased household registration system (HRS) toward the high-skilled workforce, resulting in limited supply of low-skilled labor. This policy is not conducive to enhance labor productivity in big cities and to carry out its leading role of economic growth.     

Effect of intra-industry trade on skill premium in manufacturing in China

In making use of the panel data in 27 manufacturing industries, this paper examines the recent increase in skill premium in China's manufacturing. The paper argues that the recent increase in skill premium in Chinese manufacturing can be partly attributed to the decline in intra-industry trade. A reasonable explanation on this is that the decline in intra-industry trade occurred in the period studied is associated with a decrease in output. This led to a reduction in relative demand of low-skilled workers, which supports the hypothesis of the output-skill substitutability, and finally an increase in skill premium. Further, this paper finds that the negative effect of intra-industry trade on skill premium is larger for high-skilled manufacturing than low-skilled manufacturing. One more result in this paper is that the increase in capital input reduced the skill premium in Chinese manufacturing. The empirical evidence is consistent with a modified model of intra-industry trade with differentiated products and three factor inputs: high-skilled labor, low-skilled labor and capital.     

公共服务、劳动力流动与产业集聚——兼论片面城市化政策对产业集聚的影响

文章从劳动力流动的角度分析了城市公共服务供给水平对产业集聚的影响,认为我国各级地方政府所实施的片面城市化政策导致政府对公共卫生、义务教育和社会保障等基本公共服务供给不足。流动人口难以享受到与户籍人口同等的基本公共服务,提高了劳动力区际流动的隐性成本,降低了劳动力的区际流动性,阻碍了我国产业在空间上的高效集聚。因此,为提高我国产业的地理集聚水平和经济资源的空间配置效率,有必要着力推动以流动人口市民化为核心的城市化进程。     

The impact of an accelerated depreciation tax policy on employment: Evidence from China

We examine the impact of an accelerated depreciation tax policy (ADP) on employment. As a tax incentive policy, we expect an ADP to impact firm behavior significantly, but its effect on employment remains uninvestigated. Leveraging the two-stage implementation of an ADP in selected industries in China in 2014 and 2015 and using a difference-in-differences research design, we find that: 1) the ADP significantly increases employment, which is consistent with the output effect hypothesis; and 2) the ADP increases firms’ labor demand, mainly by stimulating investment in fixed assets and easing their financial constraints. Additional analysis suggests that the impact of ADP on employment is more salient for small firms, non-state-owned firms, and high growth firms, and skilled labor employment, indicating that the ADP is more effective for firms with high financial constraints and hiring skilled labor to accompany the increase in capital investment.     

Aging,automation, and productivity in Korea

This paper examines the impact of aging in the Republic of Korea on productivity as measured by labor productivity or total factor productivity (TFP). It also assesses the effect of robot adoption on the relation between aging and productivity using industrial level data. We find that aging is negatively associated with labor productivity and TFP growth. This is true particularly when aging is measured by increases in shares of old workers. If aging is measured by increases in the median age of workers, the negative effect is weaker. Evidence also suggests that robot technology mitigates aging's negative effect on productivity growth, particularly when productivity is measured by TFP. However, there is no evidence that robots are more heavily adopted in aged industries. While robot technology does not directly contribute to higher productivity growth, our findings suggest that the robot adoption can alleviate the negative impact of aging by helping workers in their 50s and 60s contribute less adversly to productivity growth.     

Rural stratification,rural to urban migration,and urban inequality: Evidence from Iran

Recent findings on India have pointed to the importance of the rural caste structure to rural-urban migration and the creation of (partially) segmented urban labor markets. By considering cross-sectional evidence from Iran and by viewing differential access to land, instead of castes, as the determinant of the migrants' background, the implication of this view for the impact of migration on urban inequality is examined. It is found that where migrants are from a landless group urban inequality increases and where they are from a landed group it declines, ceteris paribus. Urban inequality is measured by the construction of an urban housing shares index from the census data.     

城乡人口空间迁移模式的比较研究

农村移民过度集聚不利于城市化可持续发展。文章利用第六次全国人口普查数据的研究结果显示,农村移民表现出显著的单向迁移特征,空间分布高度集中化。但城镇移民双向迁移特征更为明显,空间分布更为均衡。从劳动力市场条件的角度解释认为:户籍制度约束使得农村人口迁移仅基于经济因素考虑,因而空间集聚度很高。而城镇人口由于能够免受此类约束,迁移决策不仅基于经济因素,而且基于社会、文化、环境等多因素考虑,因而空间分布更为均衡。文章认为,建立一种相对均衡的农村移民空间迁移模式,关键是要彻底改革户籍制度,使农村移民享有与城镇居民同等的公共服务获取权。     

How does economic integration influence employment and wages in border regions? The case of the EU enlargement 2004 and Germany’s eastern border

This paper considers the (short-run) employment and wage effects of the 2004 EU enlargement on firms located close to Germany’s eastern border. We use a 50% sample of Germans plants and apply difference-in-differences estimators combined with a matching approach. We evaluate changes in total employment, the employment shares of low-skilled and East European workers and the wages for low-skilled, skilled and high-skilled workers in various sectors. Our results suggest basically no short-run employment effects of the EU enlargement except for firms active in wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants. We also find some evidence for a stronger employment of East European workers in almost all border firms, although the effects are quantitatively small. Negative wage effects are only found for skilled workers in consulting, research and related activities.     

To upgrade or to relocate? Explaining heterogeneous responses of Chinese light manufacturing firms to rising labor costs

This paper studies the heterogeneous responses of Chinese light manufacturing firms to rising labor costs from the perspective of New Structural Economics. Using the first-hand pilot survey data, we find that rising labor costs have been the number one challenge facing firms, and that despite the dominant strategy of technological upgrading, there is a substantial difference in responses across different firms. In addition, we discover that industrial and firm-specific labor intensity are key determinants of the heterogeneous strategies across firms in response to rising labor costs. We conclude that intrinsically more labor-intensive industries and firms are more likely to choose relocation instead of upgrading as a strategy to cope with the rising labor costs.     

The impacts of income gaps on migration decisions in China

Using survey data from China, this article examines the effects of income gaps on migration decisions and the sources of these gaps. The econometric results support the hypothesis that income gaps significantly influence migration decisions. When income gap reaches a certain level, the reaction of the migration probability to income gap is weaker for men than for women. The relative income of women is less sensitive to an increase in rural income but more sensitive to a decrease in urban income than that of men. Moreover, we find that the urban to rural income gap is larger for women than for men, which suggests that women receive larger monetary return from migration than men do. In decomposing income gaps, we find that the gap for men is largely determined by differences in the attributes of migrants and nonmigrants, whereas for women, the gap is mainly determined by differences in returns to attributes.     

Wage differentials between urban and rural-urban migrant workers in China

Since the end of the 1980s, the number of migrants working in the urban labor market has increased dramatically. However, migrant workers are treated differently from urban workers. In this paper we examine the labor market discrimination against rural migrants from the point of view of wage differentials using CHIP-2007 data. We apply Jann pooled method to deal with index number problem and use Heckman two step model to correct selection problem when decomposing the wage gap. The decomposition results show that a significant difference in wage gains persists between the two groups as late as 2007. In 2007 migrants only earned 49% of urban workers' income and 17% of the wage gap cannot be explained by observed factors. In detail, differences in educational attainment, work experience and distribution across industry, occupation, and ownership of enterprises account for most of the explained wage gap.