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

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-719-4_27How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Carbon Trading Pilot Policy; Corporate Employment; Labor Demand/Supply

Abstract

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.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xiuxian Fu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/09
TI  - The Employment Effect of Carbon Emission Trading Pilots—Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 6th International Conference on Enterprise Management and Economic Development (ICEMED 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 235
EP  - 243
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-719-4_27
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-719-4_27
ID  - Fu2026
ER  -