مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد ارتقای سیاسی و بهره وری سرمایه گذاری کار – الزویر 2018

Introduction

Considering that human capital is the most important factor that determines firm productivity (Erosa, Koreshkova, & Restuccia, 2010; Lazear, 2009; Moretti, 2004), investment efficiency of human capital is essential for a firm sustaining competitive advantage and high productivity level. However, there has been a great deal of literature on the factors affecting the capital market investment, such as information asymmetry in capital markets affects firm investment decisions and often results in inefficiencies in the form of over- and under-investment (Hubbard, 1998; Stein, 2001). Probably due to the data unavailability, prior studies mainly focus on the investment efficiency of capital expenditure,1 and there is surprisingly little empirical evidence examining the determinants of labor investment efficiency (Pindyck, 1988; Koeniger & Leonardi, 2007; Pinnuck & Lillis, 2007; Jung, Lee, & Weber, 2014; Alesina, Battisti, & Zeira, 2018; Ben-Nasr & Alshwer, 2016; Ghaly, Dang, & Stathopoulos, 2015). This study attempts to fill the above gap in the literature. In particular, we investigate the determinants of labor investment efficiency from a novel channel, i.e., promotion incentives of politicians. This investigation is economically significant because labor costs typically represent roughly two-thirds of economy-wide value added (Jung et al. (2014)), and labor investments are more flexible and reversible than capital investments (Pinnuck and Lillis (2007); Hall (2016)). For example, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of Manufacturers reports that the payroll and employee benefits in the manufacturing sector totaled $829 billion in 2015 but capital expenditures only amounted to $263 billion.2 In China, the labor adjustment is costly. For example, in January 2008, China adopted a new “Labor Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China”. The law requires employer to provide employees with written contracts that contain the term of employment, wages, social insurance, labor protections and so on. This new law includes not only employment contract viscosity, but also the minimum wage and the broad pay more of the economic compensation when firms dismiss employees. That means China’s labor adjustment is very costly because it has legal barrier. Some related studies discuss on relevant issues. For example, Cooper et al. (2012) demonstrate that one of the most economically important provisions is the requirement of severance payment, and the severance is twice the amount (the basic amount specified in the law) if a contract is terminated unlawfully. They also point that in China, increased severance payments lead to a reduction in productivity, since reallocation is very costly. Chen and Funke (2009) claim that the improvements design to protect workers from casualization and arbitrary firings would raise costs for employers by raising requirements for severance pay, and they view the law as the twilight of the age of cheap labor in China. Meanwhile, the economic consequence of incentives from political promotion on labor investments has yet to be investigated.