非正规就业与工资差距——来自劳动密集型企业员工调查的证据

Informal Employment and Wage Inequality:Evidence from Surveys of Employees in Labor-intensive Enterprises

本文使用2020年和2021年劳动密集型企业员工调查数据,考察了企业非正规就业对工资水平和工资差距的影响。研究发现,在控制个人特征和企业固定效应后,非正规就业人员的工资水平较正规就业人员低6.4%。异质性分析表明,非正规就业在降低中低收入人群工资的同时,增加了高收入人群的工资。机制分析表明,非正规就业人员较低的基本工资以及对工作灵活性的追求,是导致其工资水平更低的重要原因,较高的技能回报则使一部分非正规就业人员获得了超过正规就业人员的工资水平。反事实分析表明,非正规就业拉大了城镇地区的工资差距。如果没有非正规就业,劳动密集型行业员工小时工资对数方差将下降4%;而如果所有员工都属于非正规就业,小时工资对数方差将上升近32%,该工资差距的上升将主要体现为中高收入组间差距的拉大。此外,企业提供缺乏劳动合同保障、工作稳定性差的非正规就业岗位也将导致更高的工资差距。

In addition to the self-employed,informal employment includes employees who are part-time workers,who do not have formal labor contracts,and whose job assignments come from a platform.In recent years,a significant num-ber of enterprises in China have hired informal workers to circumvent labor market regulations and adjust employment more easily when facing economic uncertainties.Technological changes,such as digitalization,also cause burgeoning new types of informal employment(e.g.,platform workers).From the perspective of the supply side,the evolving demographics of the workforce(e.g.,population aging and more highly educated married women)have resulted in an increasing demand for work flexibility.Meanwhile,the past two decades have witnessed a growing wage inequality in urban China.How does informal employment influence workers'wage levels?What are the underlying mechanisms?What will happen to wage inequality when more workers are employed as informal workers?Exploring these issues is key to understanding China's income inequality and to making policies to reduce it.Based on the data of over 450,000 employees from over 40,000 labor-intensive enterprises collected in 2020 and 2021,this paper finds that the average wage level of informal employment is significantly less than formal employment by 0.184 log points and about half of the gap can be explained by education and professional skills.After controlling personal characteristics and city and firm fixed effects,informal workers'income is still significantly less than formal workers by around 6%.With higher percentiles of the wage distribution,the wage level for informal employment surpasses that of formal employment.The mechanism analysis indicates that lower basic wages and the pursuit of job flexibility result in lower wage incomes for informal employees.However,informal workers face more flexible wage determination mechanisms.Higher returns to professional skill(rather than education levels),especially in performance pay,result in some skilled informal workers receiving higher wages than formal workers.The counterfactual analysis indicates that shifting the workforce from informal to formal employment will lead to a nearly 32%increase in overall wage inequality.Examining various employee groups by gender,age,household registration(Hukou)status,education,professional skill levels,type of labor contract,and part-time vs.full-time work status indicates that informal employment tends to exacerbate wage inequality among all groups.Notably,part-time informal em-ployment without labor contract protection tends to cause higher wage inequality in China than other types of informal employment.The contributions of this paper are as follows.First,previous studies mainly used household survey data to examine the impact of informal employment on wage inequality.The employee-employer matched data used in this paper enable us to control variables at the enterprise level,significantly improving the model's goodness of fit and helping address endogeneity problems stemming from(otherwise)omitted enterprise-level factors.Additionally,the information on wage components(e.g.,basic salary and performance pay),employee title,and skill level allows for a more detailed mechanism analysis.Second,most existing studies used decomposition methods to examine the formal-informal wage gap.This paper analyzes the mechanism of the wage gap from the perspectives of wage determination and workers'pursuit of flexibility.This paper considers both general education and professional skills and explores their roles in the determination of different components of wages.It not only sheds light on the difference in average wages but also explains why some informal employees can achieve higher wages.Third,using the counterfactual analysis,this paper examines how the enlargement of informal employment will affect the wage inequality for workers in labor-intensive enterprises in China.It also explores the heterogeneity of the im-pact for different groups in terms of personal and work characteristics,as well as the heterogeneity of the impact of different types of informal employment.These analyses enable us to propose targeted policy recommendations to counterbalance the negative impact of informal employment on wage inequality.