Human Capital and Firm Innovation: Evidence from China’s Higher Education Expansion in the Late 1990s

Wen Yue

Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, 2024, vol. 60, issue 3, 500-518

Abstract: In this paper, we take the “university enrollment expansion” policy implemented by the Chinese government in 1999 as a quasi-natural experiment and use the difference-in-differences method to identify the effect of human capital expansion on firm innovation. Findings suggest that human capital expansion significantly improves firm innovation performance. More innovation is realized by promoting firms’ invention patent applications than their design and utility model patent applications. Further analysis highlights the varying impact of human capital expansion on the innovation performance of firms of different types, thus indicating significant heterogeneity. This study enriches the innovation literature on the drivers of firm innovation by identifying the role of human capital while providing new empirical evidence from the perspective of firm innovation to further understand the microeconomic effects of human capital.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1540496X.2023.2242568 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:emfitr:v:60:y:2024:i:3:p:500-518

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MREE20

DOI: 10.1080/1540496X.2023.2242568

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Emerging Markets Finance and Trade from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().