Employment Challenges and Employment Structure Adjustment of Low-Carbon City Pilot Policies: Evidence from Chinese Enterprises

Under the background of global climate change and sustainable development, low-carbon transformation has become an inevitable choice for China and even global economic development. As the cornerstone of social stability and the key to people’s well-being, employment is facing profound changes brought about by low-carbon development. Based on the micro perspective of enterprise behavior change, this paper takes the implementation of China’s low-carbon city pilot policy as an exogenous policy shock and constructs a time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) model to test the impact of the low-carbon city pilot policy on enterprise employment, based on the data of China’s A-share listed enterprises from 2008–2021. The results show that the implementation of low-carbon city pilot policies significantly expands the employment scale of enterprises and increases overall employment by about 6.77%. From the perspective of employment skill structure, it can promote the employment of high-skilled and low-skilled workers. From the perspective of employment position structure, it can promote the employment of production operations personnel, technology research and development personnel, and service and management personnel. These results are still valid after a series of robustness tests. The policy effect is due to the deepening of enterprise capital integration, green investment, technological innovation and vertical specialization. In addition, it is also affected by the differences of enterprise ownership, enterprise scale, industry pollution degree, regional environmental regulation, and market competition degree. Further research shows that low-carbon city pilot policies significantly reduce the share of labor income of employees in heavily polluting enterprises, resulting in the loss of employee welfare. From the perspective of employment, this paper provides more theoretical support and empirical evidence for low-carbon policies to drive changes in micro-enterprise behavior, so as to achieve the sustainable goals of “double carbon” and “stable employment”.