Abstract: Promoting the intelligent transformation of the manufacturing sector is a critical pathway to mitigate demographic aging constraints and to foster high-quality manufacturing development. The reform of social insurance premium collection may serve as an institutional impetus for firms’ intelligent upgrading by inducing changes in factor prices. Using a panel of A-share listed manufacturing firms in China from 2013 to 2023, this study treats the 2018 reform plan on social insurance premium collection as a quasi-natural experiment and empirically examines its effects and mechanisms on firms’“machine replacement”. The results indicate that the reform significantly accelerates firms’ adoption of industrial robots. Heterogeneity analyses further show that the effect is more pronounced among firms facing greater difficulty in cost adjustments, firms with a lighter tax burden, and firms located in regions with stronger tax enforcement. Mechanism tests suggest that the reform promotes labor-capital substitution by increasing labor costs and enhances capital-technology complementarity by raising demand for high-skilled labor, thereby improving firms’ industrial robot intensity. Accordingly, policy efforts should further advance the reform by strengthening its legal foundations and technological support, leverage the induced factor substitution and skill-complementarity effects to facilitate robot adoption, and implement targeted measures for firms and regions under the greatest transformation pressure to guide intelligent manufacturing upgrading effectively.

Key words: social insurance premium collection, tax authority full responsibility for collection, corporate tax burden pressure, enterprise machine replacement