宽带、远程服务与企业分工

Broadband, Remote Services and Division of Labor in Enterprises

《财经研究》2023年49卷第8期 页码：109 - 123 online：2023年8月3日

作者

中：王天尧 , 杨晓维

英：Wang Tianyao, Yang Xiaowei

作者单位：北京师范大学 经济与工商管理学院，北京 100875

摘要及关键词

摘要：专业化分工可以提高企业生产效率。现有研究主要关注中间产品分工，却忽视了服务分工。为考察宽带质量提升对制造业服务分工的影响，文章基于2007—2019年制造业上市公司数据，利用分批次推进的“宽带中国”示范城市政策，建立交错双重差分模型，通过二阶段双重差分估计发现：当企业所在城市入选示范城市后，企业内部执行服务任务的员工数量显著下降，其中科研技术人员表现尤为明显。与通常用信息技术替代劳动力假说来解释不同，文章认为对于难以用机器取代的知识密集型服务，服务职工减少的真正原因是宽带质量提升促进了企业用市场购买替代内部提供。具体机制是：城市入选后可以通过高质量宽带相互连接，实现了不同示范城市之间服务的远程传输，从而在缓解本地市场服务供应能力不足的同时提高了服务提供商的规模效率优势。这在实证上则表现为，对于本地服务市场规模越小、服务成本越高，以及更容易发挥出规模优势的同质化服务，政策带来的影响越显著。文章的研究为信息技术促进服务要素市场一体化和提高要素资源配置效率提供了经验证据。

关键词：宽带；远程服务；劳动分工；企业边界

Summary: Specialized division of labor can improve the production efficiency for enterprises. Existing research mainly focuses on intermediate products while neglecting services. Drawing on the data of listed manufacturing companies from 2007 to 2019 and the “Broadband China” demonstration city policy, this paper establishes a staggered DID model to identify the impact of broadband quality improvement on the division of labor in manufacturing services. Through two-stage DID estimation, it is found that when the city where the enterprise is located is selected as the “Broadband China” demonstration city, the number of internal service employees of the enterprise decreases by 416 people (compared to the average of 1423 people in the control group, a decrease of 29%), with a particularly significant decrease in R&D personnel. This indicates that the improvement of broadband quality has promoted the division of labor in services, especially in knowledge-intensive services. Mechanism testing finds that after being selected, cities can be connected to each other through high-quality broadband, achieving remote transmission of services between different demonstration cities, thereby alleviating the insufficient service supply capacity in the local market and improving the scale efficiency advantage of service providers. It shows that for homogeneous services with a smaller local service market size, higher service costs, and easier to leverage scale advantages, the impact of policies is more significant. This study provides empirical evidence for information technology to promote the integration of service factor markets and improve the efficiency of factor resource allocation. The contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it examines the impact of broadband quality on the division of labor in services, and explains the changing trends of the division of labor in knowledge-intensive services, enriching empirical research on enterprise boundaries. Second, existing literature points out that information technology promotes division of labor by reducing communication costs, while this paper emphasizes the connectivity effect of information technology and promotes the division of labor in services by expanding the market size. Third, it proposes a new perspective to explain the impact of information technology on the needs of enterprise employees. This paper points out that for service-oriented employees, information technology is not a substitute for employees, but rather promotes the transfer of employees between specialized enterprises, that is, the transfer of service employees from within manufacturing enterprises to professional service providers, which is a structural optimization.

Key words: broadband; remote services; division of labor; enterprise boundaries

其他信息

DOI：10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.20230418.301

收稿日期：2022-10-12

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