The Employment Effect of Carbon Emission Trading Pilots—Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies

Employment is fundamental to people’s livelihoods. In recent years, the Chinese government has been exploring multidimensional approaches to address the coexistence of “difficulty in finding employment” and “difficulty in recruiting workers.” Whether environmental protection can serve as a positive variable in improving employment is increasingly gaining policy attention. This paper takes the carbon emission trading pilot as the starting point, treating this market-based environmental regulation policy as a quasi-natural experiment, and employs a difference-in-differences method to systematically examine its impact on corporate employment levels. The baseline regression results show that the policy significantly increases the employment scale of A-share listed companies, and the conclusion remains robust after a series of robustness tests. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the policy’s employment-promoting effect is more pronounced in state-owned enterprises and heavily polluting firms. Further research on employment structure finds that the policy significantly increases the hiring of both high-skilled and low-skilled labor. The findings of this paper provide valuable empirical evidence and policy insights for enterprises to rationally allocate human resources, for governments to improve the employment security system, and for promoting full employment and sustainable economic development within the framework of environmental protection.