Industry-Finance Cooperation Pilot, Financing Confidence Boost, and Labor Relations Optimization: Evidence from Big Data of Judgment Documents
XU Zhaoyi, GONG Bing, YANG Siyao, XU Siyang
School of Economics, Minzu University of China; School of Global and Regional Studies, University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University;College of Finance and Statistics, Hunan University
Summary:
Building harmonious labor relations serves as a critical foundation for practicing a people-centered development philosophy and steadily advancing common prosperity. However, the current labor relations continue to face numerous challenges, with phenomena such as excessive overtime work epitomized by the “996” work schedule and wage arrears occurring from time to time. Notably, insufficient liquidity is a core economic factor triggering labor-capital conflicts. When enterprises face financial difficulties, they often resort to short-term measures such as cutting employee benefits and delaying wage payments, directly harming workers' rights and interests. Therefore, establishing a stable external financing environment is a key pathway to curb corporate short-termism and fundamentally enhance workers' sense of gain and happiness. The Chinese government places high importance on improving the financial sector's capacity to serve the real economy and has made top-level design for this purpose. Among them, the initiative to build “National Pilot Cities for Industry-Finance Cooperation” is a significant systemic project. This policy aims to break down information barriers between banks and enterprises and channel financial resources more precisely and efficiently into the real economy. Unlike the traditional “from industry to finance” internalized model, industry-finance cooperation emphasizes synergy between industry and finance while preserving their respective independence. This provides a quasi-natural experiment setting to explore how financial policies influence internal corporate governance by improving the external financing environment. Can the pilot, while enhancing the alignment between industry and finance, systematically increase the willingness and capability of local companies to improve labor relations? To examine the impact of the industry-finance cooperation pilot on corporate labor relations, the paper collects and compiles approximately 43.35 million judgment documents from the China Judgments Online from 2013 to 2021. Utilizing text mining and machine learning techniques, the paper accurately identifies labor dispute litigation data for listed company groups. Building on this, leveraging the establishment of “Industry-Finance Cooperation Pilot Cities” as an exogenous shock, the paper employs a DID (Difference-in-Differences) method to systematically evaluate the impact of industry-finance cooperation on corporate labor relations. The empirical findings are as follows: First, the industry-finance cooperation, by guiding the financial sector to support the real economy, reduces both the number of labor relations litigation cases and the litigation amounts for enterprises, thereby contributing to the improvement of corporate labor relations. This effect is more pronounced in firms with high financing constraints, managerial myopia, and those in their growth stage. Second, boosting financing confidence, safeguarding labor rights, and strengthening standardized operations are important mechanisms through which industry-finance cooperation promotes corporate labor relations. Third, the pilot shows significant effects in reducing corporate disputes related to labor contracts, wages and remuneration, and social insurance and labor security. Fourth, improved labor relations can enhance corporate labor productivity and lower stock price crash risk. Fifth, the policy also facilitates the comprehensive improvement of labor relations within the pilot cities. These findings remain robust after a series of endogeneity and robustness checks. This paper makes three main contributions: First, by analyzing big data on labor disputes based on judgment documents, the paper provides a new analytical perspective and a high-quality data foundation for researching corporate labor relations and the effects of policy interventions. Second, moving beyond the static perspective that simplistically attributes tensions in labor relations to institutional transition or technological shocks, the paper innovatively constructs a theoretical framework of “financial empowerment-resource release-relationship governance” from the dynamic perspective of corporates' access to financial resources. Third, drawing on textual analysis methods, the paper extracts and constructs a corporate “financing confidence” index from the “Management Discussion and Analysis” section of listed companies' annual reports. This textual measurement can more sensitively capture management's subjective expectations and sentiments regarding future financing conditions based on the current economic environment. In summary, this paper demonstrates that the industry-finance cooperation, which operates without equity ties, not only alleviates corporate financing constraints but also, through signaling and resource empowerment, incentivizes enterprises to translate short-term financial improvements into long-term human capital investment and the construction of harmonious labor relations. The paper provides important theoretical foundations and empirical references for promoting the synergistic advancement of high-quality economic development and people's livelihoods through financial supply-side structural reforms in the new era.
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