摘要
现有文献对员工的薪酬支付结构如何影响企业产出缺少关注。以养老保险为代表的社会保险是员工薪酬的重要构成,而中国基本养老保险缴费比例偏高,给企业造成了沉重的负担,这是否会阻碍企业生产效率的提高呢?本文利用A股上市公司财务报告附注中特有的"应付职工薪酬"明细科目披露构建指标,以及公司总部所在地法定养老保险缴费比例的时间和横截面政策变化构建外生变量,发现企业为员工支付的养老保险占员工总薪酬的比重与全要素生产率负相关,且这一负向关系仅在员工平均工资较低的企业中显著。本文还发现,较高的养老保险缴费比例增加了企业劳动力成本支出占收入的比重,同时却降低了员工当期可支配收入。养老保险缴费比例的提高还导致企业创新的下降。本文对当前的养老保险体制改革,特别是如何优化养老保险缴费结构,具有借鉴意义。
The real effects of managers'pay structure have been well studied.However,few papers have examined the real effects of employees pay structure.As the pension insurance is the most important kind of insurance in China,pension contributions take a large part of employees'pay and place a heavy burden on firms.According to statistics presented by Nielson&Smyth(2008),employee pension fees on average comprise 40%-50%of total labor costs in Chinese firms,significantly higher than in other Asian countries.Whether pension burden hinders or enhances firms productivity is still unclear in the literature.In our opinion,the optimal pension rate is at equilibrium,where the marginal costs of increasing the pension contribution rate are equal to the marginal benefits.The costs of increasing the contribution rate are as follows.First,increased employee contribution rates lead to increased labor costs,which may crowd out firms'cash flow for innovation.A decrease in innovation input may eventually lead to a decrease in productivity.Second,faced with increasing pension fees,firms transfer part of the burden to employees,lowering their disposable income in the current period and leading to a decrease in employee effort.Increasing the pension contribution rate also has three benefits.First,pension fees can be deducted from an employee's pay before tax,so increasing the contribution rate is a kind of personal tax avoidance for employees.Second,the government operates the pension fund,and the return rate may be higher than that of the investments operated by employees.Lastly,pension contribution are enforced deposit and can ensure the basic living spending of employees after retirement.Increasing the contribution rate means ensuring better living standards for the retired.Using Chinese listed non-financial firm data from 2007 to 2015,this paper investigates the causal correlation between the employee pension contribution rate and firms productivity,and the potential mechanism behind it.We construct two measures of firms employee contribution rate.The first is the firm-level effective contribution rate,calculated based on the financial data obtained from the detailed disclosure of listed corporations'annual report footnotes.The second is the exogenous city-year level statutory contribution rate,calculated based on firms'headquarter locations.We measure productivity using the residual of the Cobb-Douglas production function adjusted based on the Olley&Pakes(1996)method.We find that firms effective contribution rates are negatively correlated with productivity;and we use the different trend of the statutory contribution rates in different cities to identify the causal impact,and find the same result.We then separate the sample into two parts based on the yearly mean of average employee wage,and find that the negative correlation holds only in the low employee wage sample.In addition,high contribution rates increase firms labor cost proportion of total sales and decrease employees disposable income in the current period at the same time.Meanwhile,a high contribution burden crowds out innovation output.Our study contributes to the employment tax research(Dyreng&Maydew,2018).Despite the great deal of empirical evidence for the economic consequences of managers pay structures,there is a lack of papers investigating the effects of employees'pay structures.We find that an increase in the employee contribution rate hinders firm productivity.Our study also contributes to the emerging literature linking labor economics to corporate finance research.Research shows that labor protection laws increase firms adjusting cost,financial constraints and employee's bargaining power,and hence influence the firms investment,financing and information disclosure behavior.However,there is mixed evidence for the effect of labor protection on productivity.Our study suggests the dark side of pension contribution rates.Finally,our empirical results support the ongoing pension system reform in China.Given the different effects of a high pension contribution rate on productivity among high-and low-pay samples,we suggest that the government should decrease the basic statutory pension contribution rate and encourage firms and employees to buy enterprise annuity funds and commercial retirement insurance voluntarily.
作者
赵健宇
陆正飞
ZHAO Jianyu;LU Zhengfei
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2018年第10期97-112,共16页
Economic Research Journal
基金
国家自然科学基金重点项目(71132004)
国家自然科学基金面上项目(71872014)
北京大学光华管理学院院长基金项目资助
关键词
养老保险
缴费比例
生产效率
员工工资
Pension Insurance
Contribution Rate
Productivity
Employee Wage
作者简介
赵健宇,北京大学光华管理学院,邮政编码:100871,电子信箱:jianyu.zhao@pku.edu.cn;陆正飞,北京大学光华管理学院,邮政编码:100871,电子信箱:zflu@gsm.pku.edu.cn。
