Does internet use improve employment?——Empirical evidence from China

Abstract

Achieving comprehensive and high-quality employment is essential to achieving new levels of people’s well-being. The advancement of Internet technology not only affect the massiveness of employment, but also the quality of that. On the basis of constructing an employment quality evaluation index system, this article uses CLDS (China Labor-force Dynamics Survey) data to explore the impact of Internet use on the employment quality of workers and its underlying mechanisms. The results reveal that Internet use has a significant positive impact on improving the employment quality of workers. As the quantile of employment quality increases, internet use has a greater impact on workers with a lower employment quality quantile. In addition, the use of Internet has a more significant promoting effect on the employment quality of rural and female workers. From the perspective of mechanism, Internet use can increase workers’ social capital and influence their employment quality through the accumulation of social capital. Based on this, countermeasures and suggestions are put forward from the aspects of increasing investment and construction of Internet infrastructure, further perfecting the reform of household registration system, promoting human capital investment and social capital construction.