Social insurance premiums and corporate cash holdings: Evidence from social insurance law in China

Abstract

Corporate liquidity management is closely related to firms’ labor costs. The relationship between cash holdings and labor costs proxied by social insurance premiums is underexplored in existing literature. We explore the enactment of the 2011 Social Insurance Law in China to investigate how social insurance premiums affect corporate cash holdings policy. We find that higher social insurance premiums lead to larger cash holdings for labor-intensive firms through the increased operating leverage. Our findings are robust to falsification analysis, placebo tests, and alternative proxies for key variables. The positive effect is stronger for firms with better legal environments, state-owned enterprises, and those with more migrant workers. In addition, the excess cash holdings by labor-intensive firms increase future operating performance and firm value. Overall, our findings are in line with the precautionary theory.