Public Data Opening and Employment Stabilization: Evidence from the Opening of Public Data Platforms

Stabilizing employment is the government's top economic priority at this stage. Considering the opening of public data open platform by the government as a quasi-natural experiment scenario, the paper examines the impact of public data openness on the employment of corporate labor force using A-share non-financial listed companies as the research sample from 2010 to 2021. The study finds that public data openness significantly enhances the labor hiring capacity of enterprises, and the effect is sustainable in the long run. The mechanism test confirms that the core logic of public data openness to enhance the labor hiring capacity of enterprises lies in the scale expansion effect. Specifically, public data openness provides enterprises with data on changes in the market, allowing them to increase their physical investment and thus expanding the scale of their production; and public data openness highlights the superior transparency and governance effectiveness of localities, facilitating the entry of new enterprises and thus expanding the demand of the labour market. Heterogeneity analysis finds that the employment stabilizing effect of public data openness is more pronounced in regions with a higher degree of market segmentation, high-growth firms and digital industries. Further analysis found that there is also a significant impact of public data openness on employment structure. Openness of public data makes the change of industrial employment structure dominated by the increase of employment in the tertiary industry and the decrease of employment in the primary industry, and the change of skill structure is dominated by the increase of the proportion of production-type employees and the decrease of the proportion of service-type employees. This paper quantitatively evaluates the employment stabilization effect of data element openness, and provides lessons for advancing employment stabilization.