Recently, a special issue of research results based on China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) data has been published in China Economic Journal, an English journal in China published by the renowned Routledge Journals, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group. It is the first time for CEES-based research results to be published as a special issue in an international economic journal
A total of seven research papers, involving firm innovation, quality upgrading, government intervention, workers’ cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and labor protection, were published in this special issue. Among them, six papers were coauthored by IQDS faculties including Cheng Hong, Li Tang, Luo Lianfa, Li Dandan, Yu Hongwei, Yu Fan, Li Han and Deng Yue etc.
The matched datasets with firm performance and worker heterogeneity are rarely available today. Only few small rich countries such as Denmark have such an employer-employee survey database. Generally, the matched employer-employee datasets are not available in large OECD countries such as the United States and Japan. Needless to say, such data are rare in developing countries.
China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) conducted by Institute of Quality Development Strategy (IQDS) at Wuhan University and their collaborators is the first dataset that links firm performance with worker heterogeneity in China, and in 2015, a variety of data were collected from a comprehensive survey for 350 firms and more than 1000 employees in Guangdong province. It includes more than 500 variables on firm’s characteristics, including not only many firms’ financial variables as shown in the standard accounting sheets but also many variables on product quality, technology innovation and transformation, and human resources. Regarding worker heterogeneity, the dataset includes variables on employers’ personal information, income, education and health.
The article “Does government paternalistic care promote entrepreneurship in China? Evidence from the China Employer-Employee Survey” written by Prof. Cheng Hong and his co-authors examines whether government paternalistic care exerts positive effects on entrepreneurship in China, and the channels through which paternalistic care affects entrepreneurship, using data from the 2015 baseline of the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES). The data suggests that over 70% of manufacturing firms received at least one type of government paternalistic care, though the distributions are different depending on the firm’s size, ownership, industry, firm and entrepreneur’s age. The empirical analysis indicates that government paternalistic care negatively affects entrepreneurship by diminishing innovation capability. Human capital and imported intermediate goods should be the driving forces for a firm’s development, but government paternalistic care has a counterproductive effect on those two factors, thereby impeding entrepreneurship. The results show that those good intentions have gone awry. The government should gradually terminate its paternalistic policies for firms, and firms need to promote their own solid innovation capability.
As China’s labor cost increases dramatically after the global financial crisis in 2008, it is essentially important to understand how the rising labor cost affects firm’s production behavior. Using the China Employer–Employee Survey data, the article “The challenge to china’s enterprises from increasing labor costs: the product quality perspective” written by Dr. Luo Lianfa, Dr. Li Dandan and her co-authors, investigates the impact of rising labor costs on firm’s quality upgrading. Strong evidence indicates that unskilled labor has a higher wage growth rate than the skilled labor. Moreover, firms with higher product quality employ more skilled labor, and thus are less affected by the increasing labor costs. The empirical results suggest that some of the low-quality firms should upgrade their quality to a higher level to offset their labor cost increase.
The article “Quality-oriented growth: a new trend for Chinese firms” written by Dr. Li Tang and his co-authors considers how China’s macroeconomic policy affects manufacturing firms’ performance after the financial crisis. Using the CEES dataset, it examines the actual effect of quality-driven growth on the firms’ performance. The results show positive and significant correlation between the firms’ performance and the quality-oriented growth, which is defined as higher entrepreneurial innovation spirit, the advancement of input quality, and corporate governance improvement.
The article written by “Understanding the divergence of manufacturing enterprisesʼ profitability in China” Dr. Yu Hongwei and his co-authors aims to understand the divergence of Chinese manufacturing enterprises profitability. It measures and explores the profitability of Chinese manufacturing enterprises based on data from the China Enterprises–Employees Survey in 2015 (CEES 2015). It is found that overall profitability is divergent. It is considered that the main reason for such profitability divergence is due to firm’s different strategies in innovation, diversification, and market development.
In addition to a number of variables on firm performance, it is worth to stress that the CEES data also contain a number of sets of worker’s information, which are fantastic for many related research projects. For example, the article “Effect of cognitive abilities and non-cognitive abilities on labor wages: empirical evidence from the China Employer-Employee Survey” written by Dr. Yu Fan and his coauthors examines the heterogeneous impact on wages between workers’ cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. It is found that the cognitive and non-cognitive abilities of female and unskilled workers have a weaker impact on their wages, as compared with those of the male and skilled workers. The Mincer wage estimation results suggest that the impact of cognitive abilities on wages is generally smaller than that of the non-cognitive abilities.
Finally, the article “Labor rights in Chinese manufacturing firms: an empirical analysis based on the China Employer-Employee Survey data” written by Dr. Li Han, Dr. Deng Yue and his co-authors offers a compressive report on collective and individual labor rights in Chinese manufacturing firms. It is found that the overall protection level of collective labor rights in Chinese manufacturing firms seems to be evident: around two-third of firms offer labor unions and engage in collective wage bargaining. Equally interestingly, no evidence of discrimination is found based on demographical characters such as gender, Hukou, and education level for employees’ individual labor rights.
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