Professor Chen Dong’s Team Publishes Research Online in Authoritative Journals

Recently, the collaborative paper Digital Government Construction and Workers' Employment Choice Strategies — A Quasi-natural Experiment Based on the Reform of Big Data Governance Institutions by Professor Chen Dong and doctoral student Liu Wei from the School of Economics at Shandong University was published online in The Journal of Quantitative & Technical Economics, a domestic authoritative economics journal.

The government governance reform brought by digital technology may change the relative employment benefits between the public sector and the private sector and affect workers' employment choice strategies. Taking the reform of big data governance institutions in various regions as a quasi-natural experiment of digital government construction, this paper investigates the impact of digital government on workers' employment choice strategies and its mechanism, and further evaluates its impact on the efficiency of human capital allocation. The study finds that digital government can significantly promote highly educated workers to enter the private sector for employment, and mainly affects workers' employment choices by inhibiting rent-seeking activities, promoting economic stability and improving public services. The employment choice effect of digital government is more obvious among workers with strong employment competitiveness, strong self-interested employment motivation and strong local digital government governance functions; while changing workers' employment choice strategies, digital government also plays a role in optimizing human capital allocation, helping to improve the micro-post matching degree and macro allocation efficiency of human capital. This study deconstructs the governance mechanism of digital government and provides a new solution to the problem of human capital misallocation.

Chen Dong is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Economics at Shandong University. He has long been engaged in research on fiscal and taxation theory and policy, artificial intelligence and income distribution, medical and health and health economics. He has published papers in authoritative journals such as Economic Research Journal, China Industrial Economics, Journal of Financial Research, and The Journal of Quantitative & Technical Economics; the textbook Government Economics co-edited by him has been rated as the "11th Five-Year Plan" textbook and a high-quality textbook of the Ministry of Education. He has won the second and third prizes of Shandong Provincial Excellent Social Science Achievements, the National Excellent Financial Theory Achievement Award and other awards for many times. He has presided over many vertical projects such as the National Social Science Fund of China, the Humanities and Social Sciences Fund of the Ministry of Education, the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province and the Social Science Fund of Shandong Province for many times.

Liu Wei is a doctoral student at the School of Economics at Shandong University. His research direction is digital government and labor employment. He has published papers in academic journals such as The Journal of Quantitative & Technical Economics and South China Journal of Economics, and participated in many major projects of Shandong Provincial Soft Science.