Abstract
Based on the background of China's pilot low-carbon city initiative in 2010, 2012, and 2017, this article captures the exogenous change of enterprise labor structure based on A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2019 in Shenzhen and Shanghai Stock exchanges. With the integration of macro data on the city level and micro data on the enterprise level, adopting the time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) model, we found that 1) China's pilot low-carbon city initiative can significantly promote the upgrading of enterprise labor structure; 2) China's pilot low-carbon city initiative can significantly increase R&D investment of listed companies, suggesting that R&D investment is a channel for the impact of China's pilot low-carbon city initiative on enterprise labor structure in the pilot cities; 3) the heterogeneity analysis shows that the labor structure of the state-owned listed companies has been optimized significantly, while the labor structure of the non–state-owned listed companies is not significant. Meanwhile, the labor structure of the listed companies under high-quality government control has been optimized significantly, while the labor structure of the listed companies under low-quality government control is not significant. Overall, our study shows that the pilot low-carbon city initiative has played a governance role in China and optimized enterprise labor structure.
Highlights
Global warming, as a result of excessive emissions of greenhouse gases, destroys the balance of the ecosystem, which in turn poses a great threat to human survival
Based on the data of A-share listed companies in China, we found that the pilot low-carbon city initiative can effectively optimize the employment behavior of enterprises, which provides some empirical evidence for the government to optimize the labor structure through the pilot low-carbon city initiative
The basic regression results in the first and second columns show that the coefficient of Treat × T is significantly positive at the 1% level (β1 0.020, p < 0.01), indicating that no matter whether control variables are added or not, China’s pilot lowcarbon city initiative significantly promotes the upgrading of enterprise labor structure, which is consistent with Hypothesis 1
Summary
As a result of excessive emissions of greenhouse gases, destroys the balance of the ecosystem, which in turn poses a great threat to human survival. The study takes the release of the pilot lowcarbon city initiative as a quasi-natural experiment and employs the time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) to discuss the impact of low-carbon development of cities on enterprise labor structure. 1) This article discusses the impact of China’s pilot low-carbon city initiative on enterprise labor structure from a micro perspective, aiming to complement the literature in this area. Based on China’s pilot low-carbon city initiative launched in 2010, 2012, and 2017 as a quasi-natural experiment, this article uses the timevarying DID model to evaluate the impact of this initiative on enterprise labor structure. Considering that the effect of China’s pilot lowcarbon city initiative is heterogeneous among different enterprises, the government should formulate different policies to comprehensively optimize the employment demand of enterprises in different regions, achieving the employment goal of emission reduction policies.
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