摘要
本文分析2008年《劳动合同法》是否会降低企业投资水平,并在宏观层面拖累中国经济增长。研究发现:《劳动合同法》对国有企业投资的影响较弱;但是会显著降低民营企业的投资水平,而且这种效应主要体现在劳动密集型行业,同时这些效应对民营上市公司存在一个"阵痛"期。进一步的检验发现,《劳动合同法》对中国区域经济增长会产生负面影响,而且这种效应主要体现在民营经济投资占比高、民营经济提供就业多的区域。这表明,相对于具有雇员软约束的国有企业,以强化员工保护为目的的《劳动合同法》会降低民营企业的投资水平,进而拖累中国经济增长。就政府政策而言,要保持我国经济的持续快速增长,政府需要制定一些替代性的政策,以对冲《劳动合同法》给企业增加的雇员负担。
Since the market-oriented reform of 1978, China has undergone rapid economic growth. During this time, increasingly sharp contradictions between employees and employers have occurred that are detrimental to social harmony. To protect employees＇ benefits and maintain social harmony, a labor law was passed and executed in 2008. Studies have examined the effects of the labor law on the employment rate, cost stickiness, and operation flexibility of firms but have not investigated its effects on corporate investment or China＇s economic growth. This paper therefore tests whether the labor law has negative effects on corporate investment and economic growth in China. In theory, the effect of the labor law on corporate investment is ambiguous. The law increases the employee cost of illegal firms and reduces the flexibility of employing human capital, which decreases the net present values, growth options, switch options, and put options of projects, subsequently reducing corporate investment. However, due to the law, firms may work to improve corporate culture to incentive workers to invest in firm-specific capital or increase investment in innovative assets that include more capital and less labor, which may increase corporate investment. The data used in this paper include firm and province characteristics from 2005 to 2013. Firm data are obtained from the CSMAR and Chinese Industrial Enterprises databases, while the province data are taken from China＇s National Bureau of Statistics and Wang et al. （2013）. When corporate investment （provincial economic growth rate） is used as an independent variable, fixed effects are used, and the standard errors are clustered at the firm （province） level. We find that the labor law has an insignificant effect on the investment of state-owned firms but a significantly negative effect on the investment of private firms, which is particularly pronounced in labor-intensive industries and smaller firms, and that these effects are only found in the first three years. Th
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2017年第4期92-105,共14页
Economic Research Journal
基金
国家自然科学基金项目(71272229
71372126
71572133和71672134)的资助
