The Impact of Internet Development on Youth’s Job Quality in the Digital Economy Era: Transmission Mechanism and Empirical Test

Internet development has changed working patterns and career content, helped facilitate information and knowledge flow, and presented great potential value in improving job quality. The existing literature tends to study subjective or objective job quality individually and lacks attention to special youth groups and the influence of internet development on job quality. This study aims to examine the impact of internet development on youth job quality and the transmission channels of this impact. Job quality is a series of subjective and objective job characteristics that increase employee welfare. First, to deeply measure the material and emotional utility obtained by young people from work, we develop a subjective and objective job quality index containing five dimensions and use the entropy weight method to measure the youth job quality index. Second, we employ panel data from the China Family Panel Studies from 2016 to 2020, introduce a fixed effects model to verify the hypotheses, and confirm the robustness of the results by adopting many methods and techniques. We find that youth job quality is generally poor and presents a polarisation phenomenon. The empirical results indicate that internet development significantly improves youth job quality. From the single dimension of youth job quality, internet development has a significant positive effect on wage income, welfare treatment, job stability, job satisfaction and social security and reduces work intensity. The mechanism analysis shows that the positive effect of internet development on job quality is achieved by promoting information symmetry and improving the working ability of young people. Notably, the job quality-enhancing effect of internet development varies according to the employer type, household registration and age. This study complements the relevant literature and theory on internet development and youth job quality and provides research-based insights and references for formulating effective measures to promote the use of the internet and improve the job quality of youth.