Burden of Social Security Contributions and Firm's Robot Application
China's aging population has entered a stage of acceleration;the balance of payments of social security funds is facing severe challenges;and contradictions are further emerging.To cope with the increasing pressure of social security expenditure and increase the social security benefits of workers,a series of"strict collection and management"social security system reforms are being enforced.However,the higher social security payment burden inevitably has a negative impact on enterprise investment and performance.Therefore,how to achieve the best balance between pension security and enterprise efficiency is an important problem that needs to be dealt with jointly by the Chinese government,industries,universities,and research institutes.Many scholars pay attention to the negative impact of the social security payment burden on enterprises,but few scholars have tried to explore its positive impact on enterprises.As the main carrier of intelligent manufacturing,the large-scale application of enterprise industrial robots is an important indicator for measuring enterprise intelligent manufacturing,which not only has the potential to replace simple and repetitive routine work to supplement the future labor gap but also improve the production efficiency of enterprises through precision automated production.Accelerating the application of robots can effectively hedge against labor shortages and rising labor costs caused by an aging population.Therefore,will the social security payment burden also have a negative impact on enterprises'investment in the application of robots?Or will the application of robots force enterprises to take the initiative to use robots to ease the burden of social security payments?Answering these questions not only provides new understanding for the government and enterprises to properly cope with the dilemma of social security payment but also helps government agencies and enterprise management to further weigh the costs and benefits of enterprise application of robots to better guide enterprises to transform to intelligent manufacturing.To answer these questions,we use the implementation of the Social Insurance Law as a natural experiment and use the difference-in-differences method to investigate the impact of social security payment burden on the application of enterprise robots.The study found that after the implementation of the Social Insurance Law,enterprises in high-labor-intensive industries were more inclined to use robots than those in low-labor-intensive industries.The mechanism test reveals that the core logic of the social security payment burden affecting enterprise robot application lies in factor substitution and labor turnover effects,rather than the liquidity constraint effect,which is manifested as follows:The relative price of labor factors increase,employment decreases,fixed asset investment increases,employment instability increases,and enterprise training funds increase significantly,but the internal capital flow of enterprises does not further strain.The heterogeneity analysis found that the Social Insurance Law is more able to promote the application of robots in enterprises with weak cost transfer ability and scale expansion,as well as those that pursue high-quality products and a high degree of financing constraints.The contribution of this study is as follows:First,this study distinguishes the specific mechanism through which social insurance contribution burden affects enterprise robot application decisions.The increase in social insurance contribution burden will not only directly increase labor costs and produce a substitution effect but also strengthen the financial burden faced by enterprises and increase employment instability,leading to liquidity constraint effect and labor turnover effect in enterprises.This study makes a distinction between these three different mechanisms,emphasizing the factor substitution and labor turnover effects as the core mechanisms.Second,this study takes the application of enterprise robots as the research object,discusses the impact of the increase of social insurance contributions on the application of enterprise robots,and expands the economic benefit assessment of the implementation of the Social Insurance Law from a new perspective.Finally,this study reveals that the burden of social insurance is not contradictory with the transformation and upgrading of enterprises and provides evidence support for properly coping with the burden of social insurance contributions and the challenge of intelligent manufacturing transformation of enterprises.
Social Insurance LawSocial Security ContributionsLabor MobilityRobot Application
万方数据
维普
