最低工资政策对企业利润率的影响

The Effect of Minimum Wage on Firm Profitability in China

本文使用企业层面的面板数据以及课题组人工搜集的县级最低工资数据,估计了最低工资政策对企业利润率的影响。企业无疑会根据最低工资的变化而进行相应调整,但这一调整通常不是瞬时完成的。因此,本文使用了包含滞后期最低工资的动态面板模型。为估计最低工资政策对企业利润率的异质性影响,本文还估计了分位数回归动态面板模型。估计结果表明,在利润率的整个条件分布上,当期最低工资对企业利润率都具有负向影响。滞后期最低工资对企业利润率的影响在第5、10和15个条件分住点上是正的,但在第90和95个条件分位点上是负的;对其他条件分位点而言,滞后期最低工资对企业利润率没有影响。综合考察当期和滞后期最低工资的作用可以发现,最低工资对企业利润率的影响在第5个分位点以及第40个分位点之后的分位点都是负的,而且这一负向影响的绝对值随着条件分位点的提高而上升。对于其他条件分位点而言,当期和滞后期最低工资对企业利润率的影响并不显著。

Utilizing the firm-level panel datasets and hand-collected data on county level minimum wage,this paper estimates the effect of minimum wage on firm profitability.As firms may take time to adjust in response to changes in minimum wage,this paper estimates a dynamic panel model with lagged minimum wage.To capture the heterogeneous effect of minimum wage on profitability,this paper further estimates quantile regression dynamic panel model.Estimation results suggest that the effect of minimum wage in the current year is negative across the whole conditional distribution of profitability and it exhibits an inverted-U shape across conditional quantiles.Instead,the effect of lagged minimum wage is positive at the 5th,10 th,and thel5 th quantiles,negative at the 90 th and95th quantiles,and not significant at other quantiles.Turning to the overall effect of minimum wage,we can find that minimum wage exerts significantly negative effect on profitability at the 5 th quantile and quantiles higher than 40 th,and the absolute value of the effect of minimum wage increases with these quantiles.For other quantiles,the overall effect of minimum wage on profitability is negligible.