进口竞争、管理者激励与企业内部收入差距

Import Competition,Managerial Incentives,and the Within-firm Income Gap

完善分配制度,缩小不同群体间的收入差距是逐步实现共同富裕的重要内容。本文从企业内部管理层和普通员工之间工资差距的角度,以中国加入世界贸易组织为准自然实验,采用双重差分法考察了最终品关税下降引致的进口竞争对收入分配的影响和作用机制。研究结果表明,进口竞争显著提升了企业管理层的平均工资,同时降低了普通员工的平均工资,从而扩大了企业内部工资收入差距,这一结论在一系列稳健性检验后仍然成立;机制检验结果显示,进口竞争增加了管理者激励,并通过绩效工资和企业组织结构调整两个渠道影响企业内部的收入差距;异质性分析结果显示,进口竞争对规模较大企业、国有企业以及治理环境差的企业内部收入差距的影响更大;进一步研究表明,进口竞争增加了国有企业和治理不善企业的管理层与企业业绩无关的超额工资。本文结论为中国提高对外开放水平以及优化收入分配结构提供了一定的启发。

Improving the system of income distribution and reducing income disparities across societal groups are crucial for gradually achieving common prosperity.From the perspective of the wage gap between internal management and regular employees,this paper takes China's accession to the WTO as a quasi-natural experiment,and employs the difference-in-differences methodology to investigate the impact of import competition resulting from the reduction of final product tariffs on income distribution and the underlying mechanisms.The results indicate that import competition significantly raises the average wage of managers while reducing the average wage of ordinary employees,thereby widening the within-firm income gap.These conclusions still hold after conducting a series of robustness tests.Mechanism analysis reveals that import competition increases managerial incentives,and affects the within-firm income gap through two primary channels:performance-based pay and corporate organizational restructuring.Moreover,heterogeneity analysis demonstrates that import competition has a more pronounced effect on internal income inequality within large-scale firms,state-owned enterprises,and firms operating under poor governance conditions.Notably,supplementary research indicates that import competition induces excessive managerial wages in state-owned enterprises and poorly governed firms,regardless of their performance.The conclusions of this paper provide insights for China to enhance openness to the global economy and optimize the structure of income distribution.