小规模纳税人自开专用发票与企业吸纳就业——基于公平市场环境的视角

Abstract

For a long time, small-scale VAT taxpayers (mostly small and micro businesses) were barred from self-issuing special VAT invoices and could only apply for proxy issuance from tax authorities. This regime imposed substantial institutional transaction costs, impeded business partnerships with downstream general VAT taxpayers, exacerbated liquidity constraints, and ultimately constrained small and micro businesses' employment absorption capacity. Against this institutional backdrop, this paper exploits the phased reform of allowing small-scale VAT taxpayers to self-issue special VAT invoices in China since 2016 as a quasi-natural experiment, and empirically examines how the fair market environment fostered by administrative decentralization reform affects small and micro businesses' employment absorption capacity. This paper quantifies employment absorption capacity in two core dimensions: employment quantity and employment quality. It first delineates the institutional flaws of the invoice proxy issuance system, and theoretically analyzes the reform's transmission mechanisms: The reform not only reduces small and micro businesses' institutional transaction costs but also expands their sales reach to downstream general taxpayers. These two channels jointly ease small and micro businesses' liquidity constraints, enabling firms to expand employment and improve employee benefits. Based on this, this paper proposes a core hypothesis that the self-issuance reform significantly enhances small and micro businesses' employment absorption capacity. This paper tests this hypothesis via econometric models. The results reveal that the reform exerts a significant positive effect on both small and micro businesses' employee count and average wage levels. All robustness checks corroborate the validity of the baseline conclusions. Mechanism analysis validates the two core transmission channels: The reform significantly reduces small and micro businesses' institutional transaction costs and expands their sales scale, which jointly ease liquidity constraints and lay the financial foundation for employment expansion and wage growth. Heterogeneity analysis yields three key findings: First, the reform has a more pronounced effect on enterprises with A-level tax credit ratings, reflecting synergy with tax credit classification management; second, in regions with fully established electronic tax bureaus, the reform delivers a more significant effect on employment quality improvement, while its impact on employment quantity is more prominent in other regions; third, the reform exerts a stronger effect on small and micro businesses eligible for small low-profit enterprise income tax reductions, confirming the synergies between institutional reform and direct tax incentives. Based on these findings, this paper puts forward targeted policy implications, including advancing the unification of VAT taxpayer identity management, strengthening cross-policy coordination, and fostering benign interaction between government governance and market autonomy. This paper makes three marginal contributions: First, it enriches research on the role of institutional reform in the determinants of enterprise employment absorption capacity; second, it provides novel empirical evidence for the coordinated advancement of tax administration system reform; third, it complements empirical research on small-scale taxpayers' behavioral decision-making, offering important academic insights for improving China's tax system and promoting high-quality full employment.