Does Corporate Expansion Create Better Jobs?

Whether employment growth is converted into better jobs is central to understanding how capital markets serve the real economy and how high-quality employment policies should be evaluated. Using a panel dataset of employees and wages among Chinese listed firms compiled from CSMAR, this study constructs a firm-level sample covering 5,329 listed firms and 56,589 firm-year observations from 2000 to 2022. It examines the dynamic tension between employment absorption and pay quality from five perspectives: aggregate expansion, industry and regional differentiation, wage distribution, job flows, and within-firm adjustment. The results show that the number of sample firms increased from 1,010 to 5,106, total employment rose from 2.75 million to 29.49 million, and total employee compensation payable expanded by approximately 108.8 times. In the log growth of total compensation, employment expansion and the increase in employment-weighted average wages contributed 50.6% and 49.4%, respectively. After controlling for firm fixed effects and year fixed effects, the elasticity of average wages with respect to employment is -0.326 and remains statistically significant after winsorisation, in a balanced panel, after excluding the financial sector, among normally listed firms, and in a first-difference model. The importance of this study lies in moving the employment debate from the quantity-oriented question of stabilising jobs to the distributional question of whether employment expansion improves pay quality. It addresses the limitations of prior research, which has tended to focus on employment counts, single-year cross-sections, or employer data from advanced economies, while paying less attention to the long-run co-evolution of wages and employment among Chinese listed firms.