人力资本升级对实现企业高质量发展、维持国家经济持续增长具有重要意义。本文基于2013-2021年中国A股上市公司微观数据,利用双重差分法评估了2018年增值税留抵退税试点政策对企业人力资本结构的影响。结果显示,增值税留抵退税政策显著提高了企业的高技能劳动力占比,进而优化了企业人力资本结构。作用机制分析表明,增值税留抵退税政策对企业人力资本结构的优化作用主要通过“资本-技能互补”效应和缓解企业流动性约束两条路径来实现。异质性分析发现,对于融资约束严重、资本密集度及研发密集度低、税收负担重的企业,增值税留抵退税政策对人力资本结构的优化作用更为凸显。进一步,增值税留抵退税政策的实施显著提高了员工工资水平,但对劳动收入份额无显著影响。同时,增值税留抵退税政策显著促进了企业劳动生产率的提升,改善了企业经营绩效,提高了企业发明专利数量。本文丰富了增值税留抵退税政策的经济后果研究,为政府部门通过增值税留抵退税政策促进企业转型升级和高质量发展提供了一定的理论借鉴和实践参考。

Human capital upgrading is of paramount importance in achieving high-quality corporate development and maintaining sustained national economic growth. Based on panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies from between 2013 and 2021, this paper assesses the impact of the Value-added Tax Refund (VATR) Policy on the 2018 corporate human capital structure using the difference-in-differences (DID) method. The results indicate that the VATR Policy significantly increases the share of highly skilled labour in companies, thus optimising the corporate human capital structure. The mechanism test demonstrates that the optimisation effect of the VATR Policy on the human capital structure of companies is mainly achieved through the “capital-skill complementarity” effect and the easing of corporate liquidity constraints. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the optimisation effect of the VATR Policy on the human capital structure is more significant for companies with severe financing constraints, low capital and R&D intensity, and high tax burden intensity. The implementation of the VATR Policy also significantly increases the level of employees' wages but has no significant impact on the labour income share of companies, while the VATR Policy significantly contributes to an increase in labour productivity, improves business performance and increases the number of invention patents in companies. This paper enriches the study of the economic consequences of the VATR Policy and provides a theoretical and practical reference for government departments to promote corporate transformation, upgrading and high-quality development through the VATR Policy.

We provide new evidence that a disruption in credit supply played a quantitatively significant role in the unprecedented contraction of employment during the Great Depression using a novel, hand-collected dataset of large industrial firms. Our identification strategy exploits preexisting variation in the need to raise external funds at a time when public bond markets essentially froze. Local bank failures inhibited firms' ability to substitute public debt for private debt, which exacerbated financial constraints. We estimate a large and negative causal effect of financing frictions on firm employment. We find that the lack of access to credit likely accounted for a substantial fraction of the aggregate decline in employment of large firms between 1928 and 1933. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V.