Digital Transformation and the Restructuring of Employment: Evidence from Chinese Listed Firms

TL;DR

This study investigates how digital transformation influences employment structures in Chinese firms, showing increased demand for managerial and technical roles and decreased manual labor, driven by technological advancements like LLMs.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on how digitalization alters occupational and task demands in Chinese listed companies, integrating task-based analysis with real recruitment data.

Findings

Digitalization increases hiring in managerial, professional, and technical roles.

Demand for auxiliary and manual jobs decreases with digital transformation.

Abstract tasks demand rises, routine and manual tasks decline.

Abstract

This paper examines how digital transformation reshapes employment structures within Chinese listed firms, focusing on occupational functions and task intensity. Drawing on recruitment data classified under ISCO-08 and the Chinese Standard Occupational Classification 2022, we categorize jobs into five functional groups: management, professional, technical, auxiliary, and manual. Using a task-based framework, we construct routine, abstract, and manual task intensity indices through keyword analysis of job descriptions. We find that digitalization is associated with increased hiring in managerial, professional, and technical roles, and reduced demand for auxiliary and manual labor. At the task level, abstract task demand rises, while routine and manual tasks decline. Moderation analyses link these shifts to improvements in managerial efficiency and executive compensation. Our findings highlight how emerging technologies, including large language models (LLMs), are reshaping skill demands and labor dynamics in Chinas corporate sector.