制造业企业数字化转型如何影响员工工资

How Does the Digital Transformation of Manufacturing Firms Affect Employees'Wage?

共同富裕是社会主义的本质要求和中国式现代化的重要特征,立足数字经济背景探讨如何通过保护劳动所得促进共同富裕意义重大。基于2011—2019年中国A股制造业上市公司数据,本文实证分析了企业数字化转型对员工工资的影响。研究发现,企业数字化转型显著提高了员工工资。在此基础上,本文检验了背后的作用机制,发现经济租金分享和就业结构调整均在企业数字化转型与员工工资关系中发挥了正向的传递作用,存在企业数字化转型→经济租金增加和高技能劳动者占比提升→员工工资提高的传导机制。异质性分析结果显示,企业数字化转型对员工工资的提升作用分别在高数字化行业、资本密集型企业、非国有企业、高市场集中度行业、大企业更为突出。本文的研究结论为积极把握数字技术应用带来的机遇,持续发挥数字经济对工资合理增长和就业结构优化的作用,以及保持制造业比重基本稳定提供了一定启示。

The rise of every"new economy"in human history was driven by new technological advancement.At present,digital technology is penetrating into all aspects of economy and society,and is an important driving force of the new technological revolution.According to the White Paper on the Development of China's Digital Economy(2021),the added value of China's digital economy increased from 2.6 trillion yuan in 2005 to 39.2 trllion yuan in 2020,and its share in GDP from 14.2 percent to 38.6 percent.Digital technology affects production by forming new production factors and changing the input structure of factors,thus changing the bias of industrial factors input,which not only has a profound impact on global economy and trade,but also greatly changes the income of factor owners.Common prosperity for all by the middle of the 21"century is an important part of China's Second Centenary Goal,which is to be achieved on the basis of reasonable disparities in wealth levels.At present,in the latest round of industrial revolution characterized by the development and application of Internet,big data and artificial intelligence technologies,undoubtedlycthe pie will grow bigger"to increase economic output by improving production efficiency,but it does not mean a bigger share for everyone.Therefore,it is crucial to think about how to promote common prosperity in the digital economy.Previous studies have pointed out that digital revolution affects employment and wage levels on the whole(Dauth et al.,2018;Acemoglu and Restrepo,2018a;Liu et al.,2021),and leads to the change in factor income shares(Autor and Salomons,2018;Chen et al.,2021).At the same time,the application of digital technology also puts highly skilled employees in a favorable position in income distribution(Prettner and Strulik,2017;Lankisch et al.,2019;Acemoglu et al.,2022).However,little literature uses Chinese data to investigate the effects of digital transformation on employees'wage and employment structure,as well as the adjustment of value-creating process reflected by employment changes.In fact,a comprehensive and in-depth discussion of these issues will help us better understand the possible biased impact of the latest technological revolution and provide useful reference for formulating countermeasures.This paper empirically analyzes the impact of firms'digital transformation on employees'wage based on the data of listed A-share manufacturing firms from 2011 to 2019,and finds that the digital transformation significantly increased employees'wage.Both economic rent sharing and adjustment of employment structure play a positive pass-through role,and the transmission mechanism is like this:digital transformation increases rents and the proportion of highly skilled labor,and then increases the average wage.The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the positive effect of digital transformation on employees'wage is more prominent in industries with high digital input,capital-intensive firms,non-state-owned firms,industries with high market concentration and large firms.The research conclusions of this paper provide some enlightenment for actively embracing the opportunities brought by the application of digital technology,continuously exerting the role of digital economy in the reasonable increase of wage as well as the optimization of employment structure,and keeping the proportion of manufacturing industry basically stable.The possible marginal contributions of this paper are as follows.(1)Using individual firm data,this paper empirically tests the impact of digital transformation on employees'wage in Chinese manufacturing industry,and deepens the understanding of how digital technology affects income distribution by revealing the transmission mechanism.(2)This paper discusses how the digital transformation of manufacturing firms affects the employment skill structure,reveals the adjustment effect on the internal value-creating process,and thus contributes to existing literature.(3)This paper uses China's Input-Output Table to measure the degree of digital input of manufacturers,and compares the impact of firms'digital transformation on the industry.It is found that in manufacturers which are more likely to embrace digital transformation,digital transformation has a greater positive impact on employees'wage.In fact,the sample used in this paper is the larger and more profitable group of Chinese firms,whose digital transformation may be at the forefront of the industry,and wage raise may be more prominent.Therefore,whether the research conclusions of this paper apply to all firms remains to be tested in the future.