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| The Impact of Employment-promotion Policies on LaborHiring Behavior of Micro-level Enterprises: Evidence from Online Recruitment Big Data |
| SUN Kunpeng, LI Xinyang, XIAO Xing
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School of Public Finance and Taxation, Central University of Finance and Economics;
School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University |
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Abstract Employment constitutes the most critical livelihood issue, directly affecting public welfare, determining the sustained and healthy development of the economy and society, and even impacting national long-term stability. In recent years, Chinese central government has emphasized a people-centered development philosophy, explicitly proposing an employment-first strategy. Guided by this directive, local governments have actively placed ensuring and expanding employment as fundamental tasks for regional economic development. They have implemented comprehensive employment-promotion policies combining various policy instruments, such as fiscal subsidies, tax incentives, and credit support, tailored to local conditions.
From a theoretical perspective, economists have extensively studied how public policies affect employment since the global economic crisis of the 1930s. Keynes's seminal work, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, pioneered a modern analytical framework by integrating employment issues into the core of macroeconomic policy analysis, while economists such as Lucas further explored labor market imbalances and frictions. Although existing literature has extensively addressed the relationship between macroeconomic policies and employment, systematic and in-depth research specifically examining employment-oriented policies driven by local governments remains scarce, especially concerning their concrete impacts on micro-level enterprise recruitment.
To empirically investigate the actual effects of local government employment policies from a micro-level perspective, this study utilizes approximately 62.04 million online recruitment data records from January 2017 to December 2020, covering non-listed small-and medium-sized enterprises. Employing a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) model, the study examines these policies' impacts empirically. The results indicate that employment-promotion policies significantly increased enterprises' online recruitment activities, with an average increase of approximately 4.2% in enterprise recruitment postings at the city level following policy implementation. The mechanisms behind policy effectiveness involve three dimensions: first, direct fiscal subsidies significantly reduce recruitment costs; second, skill training and employment guidance provided to laborers reduce recruitment barriers and enhance worker productivity, thereby raising enterprises' expected returns; third, improvements in employment information services mitigate information asymmetry, enhancing matching efficiency between enterprises and laborers.
Regarding the effectiveness of policy tools, direct fiscal subsidies outperform tax incentives and credit supports, particularly the subsidies characterized by immediate and unconditional payment. Policies evaluated by incremental employment rather than existing employment scales also demonstrate greater effectiveness. Further analysis reveals more significant policy benefits exist for non-high-tech sectors, state-owned enterprises, and financially constrained firms. Cities with weaker locational advantages, lower administrative status, and relatively limited R＆D capacities experience more pronounced marginal policy effects. Additionally, the study explores actual employment absorption, finding that employment policies not only increase recruitment postings but also substantially enhance actual employment, particularly for R＆D positions, and notably improve overall enterprise wage levels.
The innovations and contributions of this study are threefold: first, it systematically examines the micro-level impacts of specialized local government employment policies on enterprise recruitment behaviors, addressing a critical research gap regarding micro-level decision-making in employment policy; second, it innovatively utilizes large-scale Internet recruitment data to precisely capture changes in enterprises' recruitment decisions, providing highly detailed micro-level evidence; third, from the perspective of labor-capital interactions, this study comprehensively evaluates the impact of employment policies on enterprise productivity, providing extensive insights for comprehensive policy assessment and future research opportunities.
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Received: 11 September 2024
Published: 13 October 2025
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