智慧城市建设如何影响劳动力就业?OA北大核心CHSSCDCSSCICSTPCD

High-quality employment is an inherent requirement for developing new quality productive forces and is an important support for promoting common prosperity.Smart city construction reconfigures urban innovation patterns,accelerates urban digital transformation,and has a profound impact on employment.This paper uses China's smart city pilot policies to construct a multi-period difference-in-differences(DID)model.Then,it investigates the impact of smart city construction on employment and its mechanism from the perspective of size and structure. The findings are as follows.First,smart city construction generally increases employment scale and optimizes the skill-level employment structure.The scale effect is greater than the structure effect,showing a marginal increasing trend of quantitative change followed by qualitative change.Second,smart city construction improves the quality and quantity of employment through the compensation of technological innovation,the allocation of network infrastructure and the accumulation of human capital.This improvement is pronounced in megacities,and areas with abundant scientific and educational resources,high levels of information application,and severe labor market distortion.Finally,the employment scale effect of smart city construction is realized through inter-industry spillover.It restrains employment in manufacturing and traditional service industries and promotes employment in the high-end service industry.However,it has no noticeable impact on agriculture,forestry,animal husbandry,fishery,and public service industries.Moreover,the internal service industry shows an asymmetric feature of the coexistence of the compensation-substitution effect.The optimization of employment structure in smart city construction mainly stems from labor skill preference and exhibits the characteristics of employment polarization. The main contributions are as follows.First,based on the dual perspectives of employment scale and structure,this paper examines the impact of smart city construction on employment,reveals the unique significance of smart city construction for more adequate and higher-quality employment in China,and enriches the empirical literature on the intersection of smart city construction and employment.Second,this paper takes the smart city pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment,uses the DID model to evaluate the employment effect of smart city construction,and further employs the instrumental variable method to alleviate the endogenous problems caused by the non-random selection of cities for the smart city pilot policy,thereby enhancing the reliability of the findings.Finally,this paper focuses on the mechanism of smart city construction affecting employment,discusses the effect of policy implementation on employment from macro and micro levels,and examines the heterogeneity of urban characteristics,industries,and individual skills to deepen the interpretation of the impact of the pilot policy on urban society.The findings provide new solutions for high-quality employment in cities under digital transformation and empirical evidence for public policy-making in employment.