Summary:
In the current context of significant employment pressure and weak economic expectations, "ensuring employment stability and strengthening confidence" has become a key factor in further promoting economic recovery and improvement. The VAT credit refund is the "highlight" of large-scale tax reduction and fee reduction, a major measure to reduce the burden on enterprises and stimulate market vitality, and a major choice for macro policies to support steady growth, employment and structural adjustment. Therefore, it is of great theoretical value and practical significance to study the impact of the tax refund policy on employment. This paper studies the impact of VAT credit refund on employment scales of enterprises, using A-share listed companies from 2016 to 2022 as the research sample and multi-period Difference-in-Differences (DID) model. Robustness tests were carried out in a number of aspects. The micro data of enterprises in this paper are derived from CSMAR database and Wind database, the macroeconomic data are derived from CEInet Statistics Database, and the text data of enterprise expectations and government expectations management level are derived from the economic news database in CNRDS database and infobank database. The study finds that the VAT credit refund led to an average increase of 2.31% in enterprise employment scale. Moreover, this effect was more pronounced for capital-intensive, growth-oriented, non-state-owned, and financially constrained enterprises. Mechanism tests indicate that this effect is achieved through alleviating corporate liquidity constraints, altering factor investment decisions, and boosting the confidence of business entities. Additionally, the study pays attention to the expectation management of fiscal policy, and finds that in regions with higher government expectation management levels, the employment promotion effect of the VAT credit refund is more pronounced. This shows that strengthening the expectation management of fiscal policy can give full play to the policy effect, and it is necessary to do a good job of expectation management from the two-way interaction between enterprises and government. This paper comprehensively evaluates the impact of the VAT credit refund on enterprise employment, providing important insights into how to further give full play to the employment effect of this policy. Firstly, as the most important preferential tax policy in recent years, the tax refund policy has provided valuable cash flow support to enterprises through unprecedented tax rebates, thereby significantly expanding the employment scale of enterprises, and playing an important supporting role in ensuring the employment of residents and protecting business entities. Secondly, the tax refund policy can directly provide enterprises with funds to alleviate the liquidity constraints of enterprises. In order to give full play to the regulatory role of the policy, we can further pay attention to the implementation of tax rebates for non-state-owned, capital-intensive and capital-constrained enterprises, and effectively provide support for these enterprises with relatively greater financial pressure, which is of far-reaching significance for stabilizing the micro-subjects and developing the macroeconomy. Thirdly, the tax rebate can play a role in stabilizing employment by improving enterprise expectations, and good local government expectation management can amplify the employment effect of tax refunds, which provides an empirical basis for the importance and necessity of "stabilizing expectations and strengthening confidence" work. The main innovation of this paper mainly lies in the following three aspects: Firstly, it explores the new mechanism of action. By constructing the enterprise expectation index based on the tone of the corporate annual report, this paper discusses whether the tax refund affects the employment of enterprises through the expectation of enterprises, and further analyzes the impact of government expectation management on the policy effect from the perspective of the government, which provides a new perspective for how the government can promote the full play of the role of fiscal and taxation policies. What's more, this paper expands the existing literature, further identifies the impact of the tax refund policy on business entities from the perspective of employment, and clarifies that the tax refund policy can "stabilize employment and strengthen confidence", which enriches the research on the impact of tax reform on the employment scale of enterprises. Finally, This paper refines the identification strategy within the scope of available data. According to the 2018-2022 policy documents on the enterprise industry, enterprise size, corporate tax credit, and whether it is the beneficiary of other tax refund policies, this paper is more accurate to identify the experimental group of enterprises than only industry identification. It should be noted that this paper takes A-share listed companies as the research sample. Although the impact of the 2022 tax refund policy on the employment scale of small and micro enterprises is considered in the empirical evidence, due to the large scale of listed enterprises, the research sample of small and micro enterprises involved in this paper is very limited. In future research, we can consider using the research samples of small and micro enterprises to further enrich the analysis of the effect of the tax refund policy.
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