企业为何选择劳务外包——基于经济政策不确定性的解释

Abstract

Labor outsourcing is a special form of labor division that allows companies to outsource repetitive, non-core activities to third-party labor contractors, thereby focusing their core resources and efforts on core business activities. The fundamental characteristic of labor outsourcing is that it helps enterprises convert long-term employment decisions into short-term employment contracts, which is reflected in increased employment flexibility and reduced labor costs. These two features make labor outsourcing a more effective employment option when dealing with uncertain market conditions. In practice, the increase in labor outsourcing is closely related to economic policy uncertainty. Economic policy uncertainty leads to the inability of firms to form consistent and stable expectations about the future decision-making environment, hence a decline in firms' demand for long-term employment. Therefore, this paper attempts to explain the logic of the abnormal boom in the labor outsourcing market in recent years from the perspective of increased economic policy uncertainty. By manually collecting the labor outsourcing information disclosed in the annual reports of listed companies from 2012 to 2021, this paper finds that economic policy uncertainty makes firms be inclined to opt for labor outsourcing, which is more significant among private firms. Furthermore, this paper uses natural language processing to construct uncertainty indicators at the macro, industry, and enterprise levels, and finds that compared with the uncertainty of enterprises and the industry, the uncertainty at the macro level is more likely to lead enterprises to choose labor outsourcing. Meanwhile, by distinguishing the business level of labor outsourcing, this paper finds that enterprises tend to outsource low-end rather than high-end business when confronted with economic policy uncertainty. The heterogeneity test shows that economic policy uncertainty is more likely to lead to labor outsourcing in firms with higher adjustment costs, while stable customer relationships in the product market, higher bargaining power, and government's policy support help to reduce the impact of economic policy uncertainty on firms' labor outsourcing. Finally, the paper finds that when economic policy uncertainty is high, labor outsourcing can improve productivity and reduce labor cost rigidity. However, it may crowd out the demand for low-skilled labor and create unequal treatment among outsourced workers.