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Efficiency of a commercial bank affects both its competitiveness and the role it plays in the process of economic development. Although great efforts have been exerted in developing the various aspects of banking efficiency, there seems to be a lack of research on examining the impact of the bank efficiency from the employee wage perspective. The mechanism of how employee wage affects commercial bank efficiency and the relationship between the two were analyzed in this paper. Based on the growing body of research on efficiency in banking, the aim of this paper is to examine if competitiveness of employee wages at any commercial bank has any impact on the bank efficiency score.

The method used was quantitative analysis, which was based on comparing the evaluated efficiencies of the banks with employee wages published in the bank reports. The empirical data in this paper were based on 16 Chinese listed commercial banks from 2004 to 2012. The per capita wage of commercial banks was selected as the wage indicator, and the efficiency value obtained by the slack-based measure (SBM) model was selected as the efficiency indicator. According to the calculated data, the Tobit regression model was built to analyze the relationship between employee wage and commercial bank efficiency.

The research results show that employee wage is the key variable that influences the efficiency of Chinese commercial banks, and the inverted U-shaped relationship between employee wage and commercial banks efficiency shows up.

The wage structure data of the composition of basic pay and bonus were not available at the time of conducting the research. Per capita wages were used instead to reflect the employee wage levels of Chinese banks.

This study can provide some help for the banking industry by analyzing the wage levels from the perspective of efficiency and also further enriches the theoretical system of the relationship between employee wage and bank efficiency.

There is no conclusive whether environmental regulation is a constraint or an incentive to the production development. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the non-linear effects of environmental regulations on economic outcomes from the combined perspective of labor productivity and environmental regulation costs.

Under the assumption of maximizing the utility of residents and maximizing the profit of firms, this research introduces a mathematical model that incorporates the promotion effect of environmental regulations on labor productivity and the costs of environmental regulations. On this basis, the authors analyze the non-linear relationship between environmental regulations and economic outcomes theoretically. This paper also conducts an empirical test using the panel data of 28 provinces in China from 1998 to 2015 through threshold regression.

Theoretical analysis shows that environmental regulations impose both the environmental regulation cost effect and the compensation effect on the labor productivity enhancement. The ultimate impact of environmental regulation on economic outcomes depends on the comparison of these two effects. Under the different intensities of environmental regulation, the magnitude of these two effects may not be equal. The empirical results further confirm the nonlinear relationship between environmental regulations and economic outcomes.

Previous studies have neglected the role of environmental regulations in improving labor productivity. This work’s main contribution is to propose a novel framework to study the non-linear relationship between environmental regulation and the growth of economic outcomes from perspective of labor productivity and the costs of environmental regulations.