An Empirical Research On The Human Capital Costs Based On Bankruptcy Possibility

Production factors of enterprises can be divided into:physical capital and human capital. Separation of two rights that is ownership and the right to operate in the modern enterprise makes the business owners of physical capital which is shareholders have the ultimate ownership of property and residual claims, but human capital owners have not the final residual claims. From the 21st century, human society entered the era of knowledge economy, with the rising value of human capital and the declining value of physical capital, human capital in the enterprise is becoming increasingly important. In the course of business or bankrupt, physical capital owners of the firms can avoid the risk by stock market, however, the proprietary nature of human capital has made human capital owners become the ultimate bearers of risk. Therefore, human capital owners began to demand compensation.Salary is an important part of the modern enterprise system study, which is reflected as the value of human capital, and compensation system has become a means to enhance the core competitiveness. Different levels of human capital owners receive different compensation (human capital costs). Management staff as a senior owner of human capital and the general staff as a general owner of human capital face different risks, and have a different understanding of risk, therefore, risk compensation requirements are so different, which result in the management staff and the general staff different formulation of salaries.Based on this background, this paper is from the view that is corporate with high bankruptcy means staff face high risk of human capital, based on the human capital theory, the compensation theory, risk compensation theory, motivation theory and psychological contract theory and so on, and combines with research at home and abroad to discuss whether the employees will require high compensation for the high human capital risk when they are expected to face greater likelihood bankruptcy. This paper selects the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange listed companies between 2000-2008 the sample data of A shares, and classifies the sample companies into ST and non ST based on the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), the staff is divided into general staff and management staff, using least squares (OLS) and instrumental variable method (IVM) for multiple linear regression with Eviews6.0, testing the correlation of capital structure and other characteristics of the companies with staff salaries by two samples and two regression estimates, and make comparative analysis. The test results is:(1) bankruptcy possibility have had a significant negative impact to the general staff of human capital costs (salary) in both of ST listed companies and non-ST listed companies, besides, the negative impact of ST listed companies are smaller than non-ST listed company; (2) The management staff salaries are significantly positively related to capital structure, and ST listed companies are larger than non-ST listed companies. Further, this paper makes recommendations of salary:in addition to considering external competitiveness and internal equity and individual factors, their risk factors should be considered when employees are facing bankruptcy of the enterprises, which is the subjective perception of risk.