published in: Review of Development Economics, 2017, 21(4), 1057-1080
This paper empirically analyzes the impact of Chinese minimum wage regulations on the firm decision to invest in physical and human capital. We exploit the geographical and inter-temporal variations of county-level minimum wages in a panel data set of all state-owned and all above-scale non-state-owned Chinese firms covering the introduction of the new Chinese minimum wage regulations in 2004. In our basic regressions including all Chinese firms, we find significant negative effects of the minimum wage on human capital investment rates and no overall effects on fixed capital investment rates. When grouping firms by their ownership structure, we find that these results hold for most firms. Foreign-owned firms are an exception to some extent, because the likelihood that they invest in human capital has not decreased in response to the policy.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.