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| Spillover Effects of the Registration System Reform on Corporate Labor Productivity from an Information Feedback Perspective |
| ZHAO Baoying, JIANG Xuanyu, YI Zhihong, ZHANG Che
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School of Business, Renmin University of China;
School of Accountancy, Central University of Finance & Economics;
School of Business, Renmin University of China;
PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University |
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Abstract The report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed that high-quality development is the essential requirement of Chinese modernization and the priority of building a modern socialist country in all respects. On the one hand, endogenous growth theory suggests that total factor productivity is a sustainable source of healthy economic growth. Marxist theory of surplus value points out that living labor is the only source of value creation while workers' surplus labor is the only source of surplus value. Labor productivity has become the core measure of productivity development, and its improvement is usually considered to be the essence of economic growth. As China's population ages, the share of working-age population has decreased, lowering its demographic dividend. Thus, focusing on strengthening the development and utilization of human resources, stabilizing the labor force participation rate, and improving the efficiency in the utilization of human resources are important initiatives to shift the driving force of economic development from the demographic dividend to the talent dividend and support high-quality economic development in the future. Additionally, the new development philosophy also prioritizes sharing as a fundamental goal of high-quality development. The concept of creating shared value reflected by enhancing corporate investment in human capital and improving corporate labor productivity also contributes to high-quality development.The capital market is critical to the high-quality development of the real economy. As the key to comprehensively deepening capital market reform, the registration system is one of the major reforms to improve the systems and mechanisms for the market allocation of production factors. Existing literature has examined the impact of the registration system reform on IPO pricing efficiency, stock liquidity, and IPO quality. Several studies also focus on the spillover effects of the registration system reform on information environment of peer companies, investment of peer companies, and the market valuation of potential reverse merger targets. Given the importance of corporate labor productivity to achieve a stable and healthy economic development in China, it is worthwhile investigating whether and how the registration system reform could influence labor productivity of peer companies.Using the data of China's A-share listed firms from 2016 to 2021, this paper finds that registered IPOs have a positive impact on the labor productivity of peer companies. Meanwhile, the spillover effects are due to the feedback effects from registered IPOs' human capital and innovative information, which alleviate peers' agency problems and incentivize peers to increase research and development (R&D) expenditure. Further analyses indicate that the spillover effects are more significant in peers facing fiercer product-market competition, with lower levels of manager and employee stock ownership, especially for innovative industries.This paper makes three theoretical contributions. First, this study contributes to the literature on the economic impact of the registration system reform. Instead of exploring the effect of the registration system reform on the registered IPOs themselves, a growing body of literature has examined the spillover effects of the registration system reform on their peer companies. However, such studies mainly provide evidence from the perspective of the information environment and corporate innovation. This paper extends to corporate labor productivity and thus supplements existing research on the spillover effects of the registration system reform. Second, this paper enriches the analytical framework for the spillover effects of information disclosure in the registration system reform. Specifically, this paper identifies information on human capital and innovation from the prospectus using textual and accounting measures. This helps us to examine the feedback effects of human capital information and innovative information on the labor productivity of registered IPOs' peer companies respectively. Therefore, by taking the perspectives of human capital information and quantitative data, the paper expands the analysis framework of the spillover effects of information disclosure in registration system reform. Thirdly, the study contributes to the literature on the influence factors of corporate labor productivity. The existing literature documents that external factors including Internet loan development, local public debt growth, business environment, and tax policy, as well as internal factors such as compensation incentive, capital structure, social security input, and managerial efficiency, are significantly related to corporate labor productivity. Nevertheless, few studies explore the relationship between capital market development and corporate labor productivity. Based on the equity capital market, this paper reports that the registration system reform and its effect of information feedback are conducive to improving the labor productivity of registered IPOs' peers, which helps the market to understand the differentiated roles of different aspects of capital market development in corporate labor productivity.This paper also provides the following policy implications. First, against the backdrop of implementing across-the-board registration-based IPO system, it is necessary to continue making rules on the content and format of information disclosure of the prospectus and improving the quality of issuers' information disclosure, especially the authenticity, accuracy, and completeness of information disclosure of human capital and innovation. The enhanced information feedback could help the capital market to serve high-quality economic development. Second, governments should continue to encourage and promote firms to increase investment in human capital, improve corporate governance, and increase R&D investment to achieve sustained optimization of corporate labor productivity.
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Received: 06 September 2023
Published: 10 September 2024
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