Tax Incentives, Factor Allocation and Within-Firm Pay Gap: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in China

This paper investigates the effect of China’s accelerated depreciation policy on within-firm pay gap. We exploit a firm-level panel data from China’s A-share listed companies and estimate the policy effects by constructing a difference-in-differences model. Results show that the accelerated depreciation policy significantly increases the within-firm pay gap of firms of pilot industries than those of non-pilot industries, and this finding continues to hold after accounting for other contemporaneous shocks and is robust to a battery of robustness checks. Our mechanism tests demonstrate that, the rank-and-file employees replaced by the use of capital rather than executives, dominates the positive nexus between within-firm pay gap and accelerated depreciation policy. This effect is more pronounced for firms with higher tax burden, stronger financing constraint and higher capital intensity. We also find that China’s accelerated depreciation policy improves overall capital allocation efficiency and labor allocation efficiency. Our findings provide a deep understanding of the link between tax incentives and within-firm pay gap, especially from the perspective of factor allocation.