Yang Jing, Jiang Yalin, Chen Hongan, Gan Shengdao
School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China.
School of Social Audit, Nanjing Audit University, Nanjing, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Aug 10;13:962806. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.962806. eCollection 2022.
As the aging population problem intensifies, many emerging economies are caught in labor shortage and rising labor costs, thus improving the corporate labor investment efficiency (LIE) is crucial for these countries. In this context, we take China as an example to explore the influence of the current booming digital finance (DF) on corporate LIE. This paper, which enriches the existing literature, is one of the few studies that explores the link between macroeconomic policies and firms' LIE. Our research adopts the baseline methodology of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, and the data comprise 23,503 observations for Chinese A-share listed businesses from 2011 to 2020. In addition, we use fixed effects regression, instrumental variables method and substitution of independent variables to deal with endogeneity and test the robustness. The outcomes suggest that DF may significantly increase corporate LIE. Further results from the path mechanism study suggest that DF could alleviate financing constraints and optimize human capital structure, both of which have a favorable effect on the LIE. Last but not least, the heterogeneity results imply that DF can more effectively encourage LIE of firms in economically underdeveloped regions and of private nature. The study recommends that emerging economies should pay attention to strengthening regulation to avoid financial risks while vigorously promoting DF. In addition, enhancing the level of human capital and optimizing human capital allocation are also essential.
随着人口老龄化问题加剧，许多新兴经济体陷入劳动力短缺和劳动力成本上升的困境，因此提高企业劳动力投资效率（LIE）对这些国家至关重要。在此背景下，我们以中国为例，探讨当前蓬勃发展的数字金融（DF）对企业LIE的影响。本文丰富了现有文献，是为数不多探讨宏观经济政策与企业LIE之间联系的研究之一。我们的研究采用普通最小二乘法（OLS）回归的基线方法，数据包括2011年至2020年中国A股上市公司的23,503个观测值。此外，我们使用固定效应回归、工具变量法和自变量替换来处理内生性并检验稳健性。结果表明，DF可能会显著提高企业LIE。路径机制研究的进一步结果表明，DF可以缓解融资约束并优化人力资本结构，这两者都对LIE有积极影响。最后但同样重要的是，异质性结果表明，DF可以更有效地促进经济欠发达地区的企业和民营企业的LIE。该研究建议，新兴经济体在大力推动DF的同时，应注意加强监管以避免金融风险。此外，提高人力资本水平和优化人力资本配置也至关重要。
