Based on the sample data of Chinese listed companies, this paper finds that the increase in customer concentration significantly reduces the level of enterprise employment. The research results are robust to a series of tests. Further analysis shows that the increase of financing constraints, the increase of enterprise risk and the decrease of profitability are the mechanism of customer concentration affecting enterprise employment. In addition, the negative correlation between customer concentration and enterprise employment is stronger for enterprises with small size, fierce industry competition, and increasing economic policy uncertainty.

We examine the relation between the CEO’s childhood socioeconomic class and corporate labor policies. We find that CEOs raised in low socioeconomic class families are less likely to invest in employee friendly firm policies measured by several types of labor and employment litigation, including litigation by unions, and occupational safety measures. These results are confirmed by crowdsourced employee firm reviews across several workplace dimensions. Our findings are supported by the studies of within-family transmission of occupational knowledge and formation of occupational norms as well as development of empathy and altruistic behaviors in children.

We study when CEOs with legal expertise are valuable for firms. In general, lawyer CEOs are negatively associated with frequency and severity in employment civil rights, contract, labor, personal injury, and securities litigation. This effect is partly induced by the CEO’s man- agement of litigation risk and reduction in other risky policies. Lawyer CEOs are further associated with an increase in gatekeepers providing additional legal oversight and a decrease in innovative activities with high litigation risk. Lawyer CEOs are more valuable during periods of enhanced compliance requirements and regulatory pressure and in indus- tries with high litigation risk or better growth opportunities.

The study examines the impact of Government-Backed Financing Guarantee (GFG) programs on employment in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using data from the Zhejiang Guarantee Group and non-listed SMEs in China. The findings demonstrate that these programs have a significant positive effect on employment in SMEs, particularly in private firms, and non-ZhuanJingTeXin firms. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that GFGs can enhance firm employment rates by mitigating financing constraints. It also contributing to firm revenue growth.

This study examines the enduring effects of China’s planned economy on contemporary social attitudes. By leveraging spatial disparities in the historical distribution of state-owned enterprises and external shocks such as the First Five-Year Plan and the Third Front Construction movement, we find that a one percentage point increase in the historical SOE proportion of industrial output corresponds with a 0.57% to 0.89% increase in the contemporary preference for state-owned sectors. The results are robust after controlling the contemporary SOE employment share, and this effect does not apply to the younger generation born after the marketization reform. Furthermore, we provide evidence that city-level state ownership preferences significantly impact the likelihood of SOEs receiving subsidies, with this effect notably amplified in cities governed by locally-born leaders, but the share of locally-born leaders has been trending down.

As China’s population ages, more older workers are participating in the labor market, including a significant number of older migrant workers moving to urban areas. However, surprisingly little research has been done on their destination city and employment patterns. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the impact of city-level and industry specialization on the employment prospects of older migrant workers. Using both individual- and city-level data, we find that unlike prime-age migrant workers, older migrant workers have higher employment probabilities in relatively less-developed lower-tier Chinese cities than in better-developed high-tier cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, or Guangzhou. This phenomenon is driven by industry specialization, particularly in the construction sector, which fosters a dense labor market and facilitates higher job-finding rates. Additionally, construction firms and real estate developers in lower-tier cities are more willing to offer better wages than those in high-tier cities, which aligns with older migrant workers’ relatively moderate education profile and wage preferences over housing costs.

This study examines the effects of the robotic subsidy policy in China’s manufacturing sector. The demand-side subsidy policy aims at encouraging manufacturing firms to invest in robotics by lowering the cost of purchase. Our difference-in-difference analysis reveals distributional impacts of municipality-level robot subsidies on manufacturing firms of different scales. Although the subsidy brings a 14.2% increase in the application of robot patents, the facilitated access to robotics has not transformed into new firm entries. Strikingly, new firm entry decreases by 23.5% after the policy implementation. On the other hand, robot subsidies have increased the revenue, total asset, and employment of larger manufacturing firms by 9.8%, 6.9%, and 6.7%, respectively. To interpret the mechanism, we develop a simplified framework incorporating financial frictions into a task-based model. The model reveals that idiosyncratic borrowing costs lead to an inefficient equilibrium by generally depressing automation adoption and creating automation dispersion across firms. Such ex-ante distortion results in a uniform subsidy disproportionately benefiting firms with better capital access, thus creating a trade-off in terms of efficiency: while the subsidy can enhance overall automation, it simultaneously exacerbates automation dispersion. To quantify the efficiency implications, we embed this simplified model into a dynamic heterogeneous-agent framework, calibrated to the 2010 productivity distribution, financial frictions, and robot density in the industrial sector in China. Our dynamic model reveals that a 20% robot subsidy narrows the gap between mean and optimal automation level by 22% percentage points, while raises automation dispersion by 49%. This results in a 1.23% increase in aggregate output at the cost of a 2.40% decline in TFP. This dynamic model proposes a novel mechanism that automation exacerbates capital misallocation by enlarging asset accumulation dispersion between workers and entrepreneurs. Controlling for this dynamic feedback could enhance the subsidy-induced output gain by an additional 26%

Does large-scale privatization increase income inequality? To answer this question, we analyze the impact of China’s reform of state-owned enterprises on labor market outcomes in urban areas from 1992 to 2004, exploiting cross-prefecture variation in reform exposure stemming from initial differences in the employment shares of urban collective enterprises and state-owned enterprises. Our analysis reveals that workers in prefectures with higher exposure to the reform experienced a more rapid decline in employment and a slower increase in income, compared to those in less exposed areas. Further analysis shows that individuals with lower income and those with lower educational attainment experienced greater losses. A backof-the-envelope analysis indicates that the reform contributed to more than 40% of the study period’s increase in income inequality.

This study investigates the relationship between ESG (environmental, social, and governance) ratings and labor share at the firm level. Using data from Chinese A-share listed firms from 2011 to 2021, we find a significantly positive relationship between the two. Furthermore, we document that state-owned enterprises do not demonstrate a strong sense of political and social responsibility in their employee recruitment projects, while companies with high ESG ratings in East China could increase their labor share due to less stringent financial constraints. Finally, the employment-creation effect of ESG ratings is one of the important channels for improving labor share. Considering the increasing awareness of ESG concepts and the boom in ESG investing, our findings hold significant relevance for employees, directors, investors, and public policymakers.

This study focuses on the unexplored informational role of labour dividend in the municipal corporate bond (MCB) market given China’s distinctive institutional origins. We aggregate the annual employments of public firms to the prefecture-city level and find that the firms’ employments aggregated are positively associated with contemporaneous scale of the MCB, whereas negatively associated with the issuing rate of the MCB. In the further analyses, we find that this information externality is conditional on the attributes of the employment characteristics (i.e., education, functional departments, and ownership nature). Mechanism analyses indicate that information accessibility, processing, dissemination, and efficacy are important channels through which the aggregate labour intensity is mobilized. And such information externality is reinforced after an institutional change enhancing the authenticity of employment information. This paper echoes previous studies of the macro value of aggregate accounting information and enriches the literature in labour and finance by highlighting that the labour dividend still exists and triggers MCB issuance in China.