Labor Force Protection,R&D Element Structure Allo-cation and Enterprise Innovation:Test of Quasi-natural Experiment Based on Social Insurance Law
As China's economy enters a new stage of develop-ment,innovation has become the primary internal driving force for high-quality economic growth.Unlike general production activities,the innovation process itself is a process of creative destruction.If innovation fails,companies may have to pay a significant amount of sunk costs,characterized by irreversibility and uncertainty.To address the uncertainty risks in corporate innovation,countries generally adopt two policy tools:tax incentives and fiscal subsidies,aiming to alleviate the financial constraints in corporate innovation and strengthen companies'positive expectations for innovative be-havior.However,these policy tools also have moral hazard issues,meaning that companies may not undertake innovative actions while enjoying preferential policies.Therefore,in the process of promoting corporate innovation,effectively safeguarding the legit-imate rights and interests of workers is fundamental to advancing high-quality innovation and enhancing the effectiveness of prefer-ential policies.The main research content of this paper includes four aspects:benchmark regression results,robustness checks,mechanism anal-ysis,and heterogeneity analysis.Specifically,this paper is based on the enterprise data set from Zhongguancun Haidian Science Park for the years 2007 to 2015,and takes the"Social Insurance Law"implemented in 2011 as a quasi-natural experiment to empirically study the impact and mechanism of labor protection on corporate innovation effects.The study finds that the implementation of the"Social Insurance Law"will continuously push up the level of cor-porate innovation through an innovation incentive effect.After a series of robustness checks such as replacing the explained variable and parallel trend tests,the conclusion still holds.Mechanism research indicates that considering the irreversible and uncertain characteristics of innovative behavior,the increase in labor costs will drive enterprises to adjust the structural allocation of R&D el-ements.In terms of innovation capital investment,companies tend to increase their investment in industry-university-research coop-eration,which is not only conducive to controlling the risk of R&D failure but also more importantly,helps enterprises to leverage the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of research institutions during the R&D process,thereby enhancing corporate innovation.At the same time,considering the reduction of costs and control of risks,companies will also actively reduce their independent R&D innova-tion investment.Further analysis of heterogeneous effects reveals that the implementation of the"Social Insurance Law"has a stron-ger innovation incentive effect on enterprises with strong financing capabilities,higher governance levels,strong entrepreneurial cog-nitive abilities,and medium to large enterprises.Against the back-drop of increasing labor protection,this paper provides empirical evidence that labor protection can promote high-quality innovation and development of enterprises through a reverse-driven approach.This paper has significant theoretical value and practical signifi-cance,and its potential marginal innovations are reflected in the following three aspects:First,most current related studies primarily use data from listed companies as samples,lacking representation of small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs);the"Social In-surance Law"mainly targets SMEs that have tax avoidance and informal labor relations,while listed companies,as representatives of high-quality enterprises in China,may have sample bias issues in policy evaluation;Second,current research on the impact of labor protection on corporate innovation mainly focuses on the allocation of capital and labor elements,R&D investment,and the skill struc-ture of corporate employees,lacking direct mechanisms that affect corporate innovation.Moreover,although labor protection may lead to adjustments in the human capital of corporate employees,most of these adjustments may come from the labor force structure in the production process,not from the structural adjustment of the R&D and innovation team dedicated to the enterprise;Third,a large num-ber of studies generally follow the mechanism that increased R&D investment enhances corporate innovation,but they do not delve into the"black box"of R&D innovation.Therefore,this paper starts from the perspective of corporate adjustment of innovation elements,on the one hand,labor protection will accelerate the ad-justment of the corporate human capital structure,by increasing the input of high-skilled labor to introduce R&D personnel and highly educated talents needed for innovation activities,thereby promoting corporate innovation;on the other hand,it will promote the adjust-ment of corporate R&D strategies,adopting more investment in industry-university-research cooperation,and reducing independent innovation investment represented by R&D equipment investment,thus opening the"black box"of R&D innovation,constructing a more complete theoretical framework,and also providing an im-portant supplement to existing related research.
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