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| Reform of the Security System and Enterprise Labor Structure |
| MA Hui, CHEN Shenglan, LIU Xiaoling
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School of Economics and Management, Tongji University;
School of Economics, Zhejiang University of Technology;
School of Management, Xiamen University |
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Abstract Legal system reforms are an important measure to intensify financial development to promote high-quality economic development; however, how legal system reforms affect labor employment has received limited attention. As a country with a large labor force, China faces constant employment problems and increasingly prominent structural problems in the labor market. Thus, our study of how the construction of the financial market legal system affects the enterprise labor force structure and the underlying mechanism not only deepens and extends the potential consequences of law and finance but also provides new insights into enterprises' employment decisions, labor market problems, and the improvement of peoples' livelihood.
Theoretically, credit availability is an important factor affecting enterprises' labor force structure, for which capital-skill complementarity is a potential channel. When enterprises use advanced machines and equipment or perform technology research and development, they need to allocate highly skilled laborers who can operate the new machines and engage in research and development. However, once the availability of external financing is exhausted, enterprises pay more attention to short-term cash flow in their decision-making. For example, when purchasing machinery and equipment, enterprises are more likely to choose used or obsolete equipment with less cash outflow in the current period; however, are less likely to perform research and development activities with a larger initial cash outflow but longer payback period and higher risk. Thus, there is a corresponding reduction in the employment of highly skilled laborers. Moreover, during the process of labor allocation, timing mismatches between cost payment and cash inflow and the “quasi-fixed attribute” amplify the constraint effects of credit availability. Constraints on credit availability may therefore significantly reduce the allocation of highly skilled labor to firms.
We use the implementation of the Property Law to conduct a quasi-natural experiment to overcome the problems of endogeneity. We also investigate the Property Law's impact on the labor structure of enterprises. Based on prior studies, this study uses the proportion of the enterprises' fixed assets before the implementation of the Property Law to identify the treatment and control groups and then uses the difference-in-differences method to test the data. We find that compared with the control firms, the treatment firms have significantly more high-skilled labor force growth after the implementation of the Property Law and that the proportion of this high-skilled labor force increases accordingly. Next, we find that the increases in advanced machinery and equipment and innovation activities are a driving force that changes the labor force structure and that this effect is more pronounced when firms' credit availability is lower or financial constraints are higher in the pre-reform period. Finally, the influence of the security system reforms on the labor structure of enterprises can improve total factor productivity and profitability.
This paper contributes to the literature on credit availability and labor allocation in firms. The relationship between credit availability and labor allocation continues to attract considerable attention; however, the interaction between credit availability and labor allocation poses challenges to the identification of the causal effects in this field. More importantly, the research in this field currently focuses on the employment of the labor force because investigations related to labor force structure are limited. In contrast, the current study uses security system reforms to examine the impact on enterprise labor structure because of their exogenous impact on credit availability. Our findings provide empirical evidence regarding the causal relationship between credit availability and labor allocation from the perspective of labor structure, which supplements the literature in this field. Moreover, this paper focuses on the labor force structure, and the study findings not only improve our understanding of the construction of a legal system to resolve the structural problems of the labor market but also provide evidence regarding the labor structure in terms of related research on the consequences of legal construction. Finally, this paper provides certain policy implications. To expand the current employment capacity and improve the quality of employment and relieve employment structural contradictions, the legal system should promote reforms. Market-oriented reforms to promote the improvement of basic financial systems can improve the financial ecology, eventually helping the real economy and benefiting people's well-being.
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Received: 13 February 2021
Published: 01 November 2022
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