Artificial Intelligence Application and Enterprise Employment:Evidence from Textual Analysis of Chinese Listed Companies'Annual Reports
At present,a new generation of scientific and technological revolution represented by artificial intelligence is emerging globally,and a new round of industrial change characterized by intelligence and digitization is accelerating.AI technologies such as voice recognition,image recognition and drones are constantly being applied on the ground,and AI products such as robots,translators and face recognition systems are being widely integrated into economic production activities,greatly improving the production efficiency of all aspects of research and development,manufacturing,operations and services.At the same time,there is a general concern in society about technological unemployment brought about by the widespread application of AI.However,due to the lack of data at the micro enterprise level,current research on the employment effects of AI technology application has mainly been conducted at the macro-level of industries and regions.Since enterprises are the main parties involved in hiring decisions,macro-level studies are unable to examine the impact mechanism in depth;and because of spillover effects,the conclusions of macro-level studies may not be applicable to the micro level.This paper constructs enterprise-level measures of the degree of AI application based on textual data from the annual reports of Chinese listed companies,and examines the effects and multiple mechanisms of AI application on enterprise employment.This paper asks five questions and gives empirical answers to each of them.Firstly,do AI applications raise the level of corporate employment?Artificial Intelligence applications significantly increase the level of corporate employment,and this conclusion holds in various robustness tests.Secondly,why does AI application enhance the level of corporate employment?Current AI applications mainly promote enterprise employment by enhancing enterprise productivity and competitiveness and then expanding enterprise production scale.Thirdly,what type of labor force in a firm is boosted by AI applications?AI applications increase the share of high and low-skilled labor and labor for non-routine tasks,and decrease the share of medium-skilled labor and labor for routine tasks.Fourthly,under what conditions do AI applications raise the level of employment in a firm?The employment-boosting effect of AI applications only occurs when the price elasticity of product demand is large,the AI technical capability is strong and the fit with enterprise application scenarios is high.Fifthly,are there heterogeneity and spillover effects in the employment effects of AI applications?There is heterogeneity in the employment-boosting effect of AI applications on firms,which is more pronounced among firms in large-scale,state-owned,exporting,labor-intensive,and highly market-concentrated industries.There is a spillover phenomenon in the employment effect of AI application,and AI application will promote the employment of the enterprises that produce AI products in the region,and at the same time,reduce the employment of the enterprises that do not apply AI in the same industry.The findings of this paper can provide useful insights for the government to formulate AI-related industrial policies,and the education policy,antitrust policy and export trade policy in the era of AI need to be optimized and strengthened.Compared with existing studies,there are three marginal contributions of this paper.Firstly,based on publicly available textual data from annual reports of listed companies,this paper adopts textual analysis to construct micro-level indicators of enterprise AI application,which provides a basic measure for conducting relevant research at the micro enterprise level.Secondly,based on Chinese data,this paper adopts the method of multi-mechanism analysis to examine in depth the mechanism and the conditions of AI applications to promote corporate employment,deepening the understanding of the problem of technological unemployment.Thirdly,this paper examines the heterogeneity and industry spillover effects,which enriches the research conclusions and complements the existing research literature,and can provide useful references for the government to formulate relevant AI industrial policies and employment policies.
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