As a significant measure in China's tax reform, the impact of the Value-Added Tax (VAT) credit refund policy on income distribution remains an area ripe for research. This paper takes the 2018 VAT credit refund reform as a quasi-natural experiment and empirically examines the effect of the VAT credit refund policy on labor skill premium and its underlying mechanisms using data from China's A-share listed companies. The study finds that: (1) The VAT credit refund policy significantly widens the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers within enterprises, thereby enhancing the labor skill premium, a conclusion that holds after a series of robustness tests. (2) Mechanism tests suggest that, under the “capital-skill complementarity” hypothesis, the VAT credit refund policy primarily boosts the labor skill premium through mechanisms that incentivize capital investment and alleviate liquidity constraints. (3) Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the impact of the VAT credit refund policy varies across different firms, with more pronounced effects on the labor skill premium in firms facing high financing constraints, high tax burdens, mature firms, and those in industries with lower technological levels. This paper enriches the research on the economic consequences of the VAT credit refund policy from the perspective of labor skill premium and provides new theoretical and practical references for the government to optimize tax policy design and promote common prosperity.

Digital technology innovation and application play a significant role in improving the information environment of an industry and driving productivity growth in related enterprises. This paper examines the impact of digital transformation among peer enterprises on total factor productivity growth and its underlying mechanisms, based on data from Chinese listed companies. The findings indicate that digital transformation among peer enterprises significantly promotes total factor productivity growth, suggesting that digital transformation exhibits horizontal spillover effects within the same industry. Mechanism testing results show that digital transformation among peer firms exerts an information spillover effect by increasing the quantity and improving the quality of information disclosure, thereby driving TFP growth. Furthermore, the higher the technological similarity between firms, the more beneficial digital transformation among peer firms is for facilitating the information spillover mechanism. Additionally, the higher the level of industry competition, the stronger the productivity spillover effect of digital transformation among peer firms. This study expands the scope of research on the spillover effects of corporate digital transformation, providing valuable insights for optimising industry information environments and refining digital transformation policies through digital technology.