中国劳动参与率为何下降？——基于财富效应的视角

《财经研究》 2022年48卷第6期 页码：94 - 108  online：2022年6月6日

中国劳动参与率为何下降？——基于财富效应的视角

Why does China’s Labor Participation Rate Fall? Based on the Perspective of Wealth

作者（中）：余家林1, 杨梦俊2, 付明卫3

作者（英）：Yu Jialin1, Yang Mengjun2, Fu Mingwei3

作者单位：1.中国人民大学 经济学院，北京 100872 2.厦门大学 邹至庄经济研究中心，福建 厦门 361005 3.中国社会科学院 经济研究所，北京 100836

摘要：劳动参与率与劳动年龄人口共同决定劳动力的供给规模。随着老龄化进程加速，中国通过持续优化生育政策来控制劳动年龄人口长期下降的态势。文章从家庭财富角度探究中国劳动参与率下降的原因。文章基于中国家庭追踪调查（CFPS）2010—2018年的调查数据，利用房屋拆迁给家庭财富带来的外生冲击这一自然实验，采用工具变量法，研究家庭财富对劳动参与率的影响及作用机制。研究发现，家庭财富增加使得部分劳动年龄人口退出就业市场，从而降低劳动参与率。平均而言，家庭财富增加1%会导致劳动参与率下降0.19个百分点。通过机制分析发现，财富增加致使劳动者以照顾家庭为由退出劳动力市场，但这些退出群体实际上将更多时间用于休闲活动。并且，劳动参与的负向财富效应在户主的年龄、文化水平和身体健康状况方面存在异质性。由于家庭通常作为一个整体进行劳动供给决策，文章从家庭层面探究劳动参与率下降的原因，弥补了已有研究的不足。文章的研究发现对准确认识和把握劳动参与率变化的客观规律与最大限度发挥劳动对经济社会发展的促进作用具有重要的政策参考意义。

关键词：家庭财富; 劳动参与率; 人口红利; 房屋拆迁

Summary: A vital source of economic growth is the increase in labor force, and the scale of labor supply in a country is determined by working-age population and the labor participation rate. However, the continued decline of the labor force participation rate in China has received little attention from policymakers and researchers. Obviously, it is crucial to explore the reasons for the steadily dropping in China’s labor participation rate.From the perspective of household wealth, this paper uses five rounds of survey data of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2010 to 2018 and uses house demolition as an instrumental variable. It shows that a 1% increase in household wealth can reduce the labor participation rate by an average of 0.19 percentage points. However, the increase in household wealth does not make the people who withdrew from the labor market devote more time to housework, tutoring children to do homework and other family-care activities, but make them devote more time to sleep and rest, watching TV and movies, and other leisure activities. In addition, this paper finds that household wealth has a heterogeneous effect among family groups with different ages, education levels, and health status of the head of the household.This paper is helpful in accurately understanding and grasping the objective laws of changes in labor force participation. And the government should follow and use the law to promote high-quality economic development. In particular, the government should not only revise and improve the laws and regulations on work to improve employee well-being and decrease cost of working, but also carry out important projects that benefit people in order to fully exploit the impact of consumption on production and foster a new economic growth point.The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, it constructs variables such as labor participation rate, employment rate, and unemployment rate at the household level, while existing literature mostly uses individual-level variables, which may underestimate the negative impact of wealth on the labor participation rate. Secondly, it explores the impact of household net wealth on labor participation, while existing literature only focuses on certain types of family wealth, such as housing property, or financial property, etc. Virtually, individuals may use financial wealth to purchase the real estate, but it does not change the net wealth. Finally, it uses house demolition as a new exogenous wealth shock.

Key words: household wealth; labor participation rate; demographic dividend; house demolition

DOI：10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.20220216.401

收稿日期：2021-9-16

基金项目：中国人民大学2020年度“中央高校建设世界一流大学（学科）和特色发展引导专项资金”

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