Corporate digital transformation and labor structure upgrading

Bin Dou, SongLin Guo, XiaoChen Chang and Yong Wang

International Review of Financial Analysis, 2023, vol. 90, issue C

Abstract: Corporate digital transformation aims to transform general-purpose technology into specific technology truly needed for development. Unlike informatisation related to business outsourcing, digitalisation needs professional labourers skilled in digital hardware and software, which means that the corporate digital transformation would promote the upgrade of the labour structure. This paper examines the financial and text data of annual reports of listed companies in China to test this theoretical hypothesis. We use word segmentation technology and word frequency statistical methods to construct corporate digital transformation indicators and empirically test corporate digital transformation's impact on labour force structure. The empirical outcomes indicate that corporate digital transformation has significantly increased the proportion of highly educated, highly skilled and research and development researchers. In this process, China's unique ‘engineer dividend’ can enhance the positive impact of digital transformation on upgrading the labour structure. The conclusion of this paper provides rich empirical evidence for accelerating the digital transformation and taking advantage of the engineer dividend in China.

Keywords: Digital transformation; Labour force structure; Engineer dividend; Textual analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 G30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finana:v:90:y:2023:i:c:s1057521923004209

DOI: 10.1016/j.irfa.2023.102904

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