Environmental regulation and intra-firm wage inequality: A skill premium perspective

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-06-21 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108679

Ruting Huang, Shanshan Duan, Xiyan Li

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This paper investigates how firms respond to environmental regulations and their impact on the wage gap between skilled and unskilled labor. We employ a difference-in-difference-in-differences estimation strategy based on the dataset of prefecture-level SO2 emission reduction targets obtained by the Eleventh Five-Year Plan and firm-level datasets from 2002 to 2008. Results show that more polluted firms undergo a larger wage gap expansion between skilled and unskilled labor. This effect is pronounced among firms located in eastern or highly regulated regions, and those that are labor-intensive. Moreover, further analysis suggests that the gap results from relative wage adjustments rather than from extensive margin or relative migration patterns. Skill-biased technological change is pivotal in increasing the skill premium and bargaining power of skilled workers, driven by the technological biases embedded in environmental regulations. Overall, our findings shed light on environmental regulation policy to safeguard distributional equality.

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环境监管与企业内部工资不平等：技能溢价视角

本文研究了企业如何应对环境法规及其对熟练劳动力和非熟练劳动力之间工资差距的影响。本文基于“十一五”规划地级二氧化硫减排目标数据集和2002 - 2008年企业数据集，采用了“差中差中差”估算策略。结果表明，污染越严重的企业，熟练工人和非熟练工人之间的工资差距扩大越大。这种效应在位于东部或高度管制地区的公司以及那些劳动密集型公司中表现得尤为明显。此外，进一步的分析表明，这种差距是由相对工资调整造成的，而不是由巨大的边际或相对的移徙模式造成的。技术偏向的技术变革在提高技术工人的技能溢价和议价能力方面发挥着关键作用，其驱动因素是环境法规中隐含的技术偏见。总的来说，我们的研究结果揭示了保护分配平等的环境监管政策。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.