Job Stabilization Subsidy,Liquidity Constraints and Corporate Employment in China
Social employment not only represents the efficient use of labor resources,but plays a vital role in a country's economic growth,social harmony and overall stability.At the current stage,the unemployment situation is severe and complex in China,so it is of great significance to utilize fiscal and subsidy policies to stabilize employment.Job stabilization subsidy is one of the important policy tools for the state to regulate unemployment risks,reduce the burden on enterprises and stabilize the employment situation.Initiated in 2009,this policy has progressively increased in implementation strength and expanded in coverage over the years.However,there is a noticeable lack of comprehensive research on the effectiveness of job stabilization subsidy.Thus,evaluating the economic effects of job stabilization subsidy is of great significance for further optimizing and adjusting related stable employment policies.Existing studies have demonstrated that government subsidies increase the income and profits of businesses.This boost in financial resources can effectively elevate the economic standing of enterprises,leading to a positive impact on their production and operations,such as R&D activities,investment,and financing decisions.The incentivizing role of government subsidies serves as a crucial policy instrument for the strategic regulation and optimization of resource allocation.Enterprises,being the primary employers,play a vital role in the labor market.Therefore,ensuring the smooth functioning of enterprises is essential for enhancing employment rates and achieving the strategic objective of stabilizing employment.Given labor cannot be used as collateral and the potential mismatch between salary expenses and corporate cash flow,the ability of enterprises to maintain stable and sufficient cash flow is crucial for sustaining labor employment.To verify whether the implementation of job stabilization subsidy can promote enterprises to expand the scale of labor employment,this paper regards the implementation of job stabilization subsidy as a quasi-natural experiment and systematically investigates the impact of this policy on corporate employment based on data from China's A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2021.The baseline regression results show that job stabilization subsidy significantly increases the scale of corporate employment.Further mechanism tests find that after obtaining job stabilization subsidy,firms'total liabilities and bank loan increase,financing costs reduce and the scale of cash flow and dividend distribution increase,supporting the liquidity constraints channel.Moreover,this paper conducts a variety of heterogeneity analyses on the employment effect of job stabilization subsidy based on firm characteristics:the status of financing constraints,labor intensity and tax burden.Our results find that the positive employment impact of job stabilization subsidy policy is more significant for firms with greater financing constraints,higher labor intensity,and heavier tax burden.In addition,job stabilization subsidy has no significant impact on per-capita wage,labor income shares and employee structure.The contributions of this paper are mainly reflected in the following three aspects:Firstly,this paper systematically examines the economic effects of job stabilization subsidy.Due to reasons such as data availability,there is still a lack of research on job stabilization subsidy in the existing literature,and the research on the economic effects of this policy has not been fully carried out.This paper deeply analyzes the impact of job stabilization subsidy on corporate employment and further explores the underlying mechanisms,including the direct injection effect of subsidy funds and the indirect signaling effect,contributing to the research on the economic effects of job stabilization subsidy and corporate employment.Secondly,this paper confirms that alleviating liquidity constraints is the core mechanism through which job stabilization subsidy affects corporate employment.Previous studies have examined the employment impact of liquidity constraints from various perspectives,such as financial development,political connections and social insurance payments.This paper,however,takes advantage of the implementation of job stabilization subsidy policy as a scenario for empirical tests,confirming that this policy effectively alleviates the liquidity constraints of enterprises,thereby promoting an employment increase.It also finds that the signaling effect of job stabilization subsidy plays a more prominent role in this process,providing new evidence for the literature on the impact of liquidity constraints on corporate employment.Thirdly,the findings have important policy implications.We conclude that job stabilization subsidy effectively alleviates the liquidity constraints of enterprises,provides financial support for corporate labor employment,and significantly promotes the scale of corporate employment.This provides empirical explanations for the effectiveness of job stabilization subsidy in promoting employment and offers academic references and empirical evidence for government departments to use these policies to assist struggling enterprises,support business development,and stabilize employment.
万方数据
维普
