Research on the Influence of Environmental Regulation on Social Employment—An Empirical Analysis Based on the STR Model

Environmental regulation will affect social employment through corporate costs, technological innovation, industrial upgrading, and industrial transfer. To verify the effect of environmental regulation on social employment in different periods and under the intensity of environmental regulation, in this paper, environmental regulation is introduced as an influencing factor of social employment levels, based on China’s urban registration unemployment data from 1987 to 2017. A nonlinear smoothing autoregressive model is used to analyze the nonlinear long-term effect relationship between environmental regulation and social employment. The research results show that the relationship between environmental regulation and social employment does exhibit the characteristics of nonlinear transformation under different mechanisms, and the transformation speed is fast. The specific manifestation is that the environmental regulation has a restraining effect on social employment in the short term, and the environmental regulation has a promoting effect on social employment in the long term. Continued high-level environmental regulations will exacerbate the adverse impact of environmental regulations on social employment.