Research On The Impact Of Firm Characteristics On The Gender Employment And Wage Gap

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China,the CPC and the government have been committed to promoting gender equality.The status of females has been significantly enhanced in a wide range of fields,including the economy,politics,and education.However,gender gaps still exist in employment and wage across the labor market.The increase in gender gaps in employment and wage not only exacerbates gender inequalities in other areas such as education and health but also has a negative impact on economic growth and sustainable development.An in-depth study of the factors affecting gender employment and wage inequality is therefore crucial for promoting targeted labor market policy interventions and institution development and thus contributing to gender equality and even sustainable economic development.A large body of studies has analyzed gender employment and wage gap from the perspective of the labor supply side,but not enough attention has been paid to the side of labor demand.When information is symmetrical,individual productivity information can be precisely identified by firms,and labor productivity is only related to individual characteristics but not firm characteristics,it makes intuitive sense to focus on the labor supply side of the study.However,in the real labor market,information is highly asymmetric.Firms’ limited identification of information on labor productivity can lead to statistical discrimination.Meanwhile,in a production process with multiple factor inputs,there is a correlation between the marginal output of labor and other factors(such as capital and technology),making the productivity of workers also relevant to the production characteristics of the firm.The intensity of statistical discrimination and the scale of the marginal output of labor directly affect employment and wages.When the process by which firms identify information on labor productivity and the elasticity of substitution between different factors of production varies by gender,it is possible for firms to influence the gender employment and wage gap.Firm characteristics include a rich set of dimensions,but not all of them will affect gender employment and wage gap.In this thesis,based on a theoretical review of the firm’s decisionmaking process and a realistic observation of the characteristics of the Chinese economy,the firm characteristics chosen to focus on include the gender of the firm’s employer,the firm’s financing constraints,and the use of information technology in firms.Two of the firm’s decision-making processes include the identification of labor productivity signals by firms under information asymmetry and the use of labor,capital,and technology in production under factor heterogeneity and elasticity of substitution.Three facts that are typical of the Chinese economy include the fact that the proportion of males among employers is much higher than that of females;that financing constraints are a major challenge for Chinese SMEs;and that the information technology boom is still on the rise in China.Based on these facts,it is important to examine the impact of these three firm characteristics on gender employment and wage gap,which has theoretical implications as well as rich practical implications.The specific research questions and findings of this thesis include the following three sections.The first section focuses on the process by which firms assess workers with limited information and examines the impact of employer gender on the gender employment gap.This thesis constructs a theoretical model and proposes that the presence of female employers reduces the gender employment gap based on the statistical discrimination theory and the hypothesis of higher productivity signal recognition efficiency among same-sex individuals.Using data from the World Bank China-Enterprise Survey 2012,this thesis finds that:(1)the presence of female employers significantly increases the share of female employees and reduces the gender employment gap within firms;(2)this effect holds after using instrumental variables and double machine learning models to deal with potential endogeneity;(3)female employers can reduce gender employment gap by mitigating statistical discrimination against female workers;(4)female employers have a stronger effect on gender employment gap in smaller firms;(5)two competing hypotheses are proposed in this thesis,i.e.,female employers may have a subjective preference for female workers and female employers may have a productivity complementarity effect with female workers,however,empirical examinations find no evidence to support these two competing hypotheses;(6)when using the data of Annual Survey of Industrial Production(ASIP)collected by the National Bureau of Statistics of China from 2004 to 2007 and adopting methods such BERT(Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers)neural network model to extract gender information from the names of legal representatives for robustness tests,this thesis also draws conclusions consistent with the above.The following two sections focus on the process of production in which firms combine labor with capital and technology under the presence of heterogeneous elasticity of substitution of factors.The second part focuses on capital and the third part on technology.The second section incorporates financing constraints into the production process and examines the impact of financing constraints on the gender employment gap.Based on a two-level nested constant elasticity of substitution production function with three factors,this thesis constructs a theoretical model and proposes that financing constraints widen the gender employment gap by combining the hypothesis that capital and skills are complementary and that females have a comparative advantage in skilled labor.Based on the ASIP dataset from 2004 to 2007,this thesis finds that:(1)financing constraints significantly reduce the share of female employees and increase the gender employment gap within the firms;(2)this effect holds after using the presence of city commercial banks or foreign banks within 5KM of the firm as an instrumental variable to deal with potential endogeneity.This thesis further explores the mechanism and finds that:(3)financing constraints reduce the share of female employment by reducing firms’ capital investments;(4)the greater the complementarity between capital and skilled labor,the greater the impact of financing constraints on the gender employment gap;(5)by measuring labor output with patent filings and extracting gender information from the names of patent inventors,this thesis finds that financing constraints reduce labor productivity for female,compared to male.Heterogeneity analysis shows that:(6)the effect of financing constraints on the gender employment gap is greater in industries with higher external finance dependent and among highly educated groups.The third section incorporates information technology into the production process and examines the impact of the use of information technology in firms on the gender wage gap.This thesis constructs a theoretical model and proposes that the use of firm information technology in firms reduces the gender wage gap under the hypothesis that information technology is a stronger substitute for routine tasks,while females have a comparative advantage in non-routine tasks.Based on the data of the China Family Panel Survey(CFPS)from 2014 to 2018,this thesis finds that:(1)The use of firm information technology reduces the gender wage gap overall,and this effect is independent of the effects of individual daily information technology use and the prevalence of regional robotics on the gender wage gap.Two explorations of the mechanisms of effect find that(2)firm information technology is complementary to cognitive skills and non-conventional tasks,but substitutable for motor skills in wage decisions,while females are more likely to be in cognitive skill-intensive and non-conventional task-intensive occupations,and males are more likely to be in motor skills intensive occupations.(3)Based on web crawling techniques to obtain millions of "firm-vacancy" matched data,we find that the use of information technology in firms increases the demand for labor to handle non-conventional tasks.Further,heterogeneity analysis based on unconditional quantile regression shows that:(4)the use of firm information technology reduces the gender wage gap in the medium and low wage groups,but increases the gender wage gap in the high wage group;(5)the mechanism of the above asymmetric effect is that firm information technology has a stronger effect on the wages of low-wage female and high-wage male.(6)Finally,using the National E-Commerce Pilot Program as a quasi-natural experiment to perform Difference in Differences(DID)estimation,this thesis finds that this policy,which is closely related to firm information technology,significantly reduces the gender employment gap,and that this effect is independent of the effect of the broadband China policy on the gender employment gap.The novelty of this thesis is that most previous studies have focused on the impact of labor supply-side characteristics on gender employment and wage gap,while less attention has been paid to the demand side.This thesis examines the impact of managerial characteristics(employer gender)affecting the information identification process of firms,as well as capital characteristics(financing constraints)and technological characteristics(information technology)that influence the firm’s production process,on gender employment and wage gap,by focusing on the process of firms’ identification of information on labor productivity under the conditions of information asymmetry,a typical characteristic of labor markets,and the production process of firms under the conditions of heterogeneous elasticity of substitution of production factors.These help to answer the question of why firms that are assumed to seek maximum profit can influence gender employment and wage inequality.Furthermore,this thesis contributes to three important strands of literature on female leader and the gender gap,financial factors and the gender gap,and technological progress and the gender gap.The findings of this thesis have important implications for policy-making.Firms may treat employees of different genders differently for reasons other than subjective preferences,and therefore traditional policies aimed at reducing subjective discrimination by firms may not be able to completely eliminate gender employment and wage inequalities.The government needs to consider the information constraints and financial constraints faced by firms objectively as well as changes in labor demand due to technological development when formulating policies related to the promotion of gender equality,so as to carry out policy interventions and institution-building more effectively.Based on the findings of this thesis,the following three policy recommendations are proposed:(1)in the short term,promote female entrepreneurship by providing credit support and skills training for females,so that female employers can become an important lever to promote female employment,and in the long run,optimize the efficiency of labor market information delivery.(2)Reduce the financing constraints of firms by deepening financial reforms and other approaches,and exploit the comparative advantage of females in skilled labor.(3)Promote the use of information technology at the firm level by increasing infrastructure development,and provide training for females in information technology skills.