【讲座时间】2025年4月18日 15:30
【讲座地点】会计学院108室
【讲座主题】Unintended Consequences of Mandatory Employee Heat Protection: Evidence from Chinese Firms
【嘉宾介绍】许年行，香港中文大学商学院助理教授
他的主要研究方向是公司财务、气候金融和金融科技。先后获得国家自然科学基金“杰出青年科学基金项目”“优秀青年科学基金项目”和“原创探索计划项目”、全国优秀博士学位论文，入选国家级青年人才计划和中组部首批“青年拔尖人才”（国家“万人计划”），荣获中国教师发展基金会首届“卓越青年研究生导师奖励基金”。已在本领域国内外一流期刊Journal of Financial Economics、Management Science、Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis、Contemporary Accounting Research、Review of Finance、《经济研究》、《管理世界》、《管理科学学报》等发表论文50余篇。入选2020-2024年“爱思唯尔中国高被引学者”。学术成果先后获得中国高校人文社会科学研究优秀成果一等奖、二等奖和三等奖、中国金融学年会、China International Conference in Finance（CICF）、China Financial Research Conference（CFRC）、The Chinese Finance Association（TCFA）等国内外学术会议优秀论文奖。
【内容提要】
Leveraging exogenous upgrades of outdoor workers’ heat protection policies in 2010 and 2012 in a large Chinese city, our research tests whether employers take strategic responses to mitigate or even offset the increase of human capital cost and, thus, harm the welfare of employees. Using a micro-level employer-employee matched panel database with the annual total income information covering over three million workers between 2008 and 2014, and applying a differences-in-differences approach, we find that: (1) Despite the policy raising the heat protection allowance standard twice for employees, the affected employers decreased the employees’ total compensation by approximately 3%, especially for low-income and male employees. (2) Following the requirement of prohibiting overtime outdoor work under extreme heat, the affected employers decreased employment by approximately 4%. Both findings concentrate on private firms rather than state-owned firms, suggesting revenue-oriented incentives are behind the strategic responses of employers. The results remain robust after applying a series of alternative definitions of treatment firms using firm-name-based Chat-GPT textual analysis and after expanding the single-city employee-level analysis to muti-city firm-level analysis by covering eight provinces between 2009 and 2016. Further analysis suggests that advanced governance environment can help mitigate the negative policy impacts. Overall, our findings shed light on the unintended consequences of mandatory employee protection and highlight the challenge of labor protection in the background of global warming.
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