The high income problem of China’s monopoly enterprises has been widely concerned by all sectors of society. The existing literature finds that the unreasonable high salary paid by monopoly enterprises is the main reason for the large income gap between employees of monopoly enterprises and non-monopoly enterprises. Therefore, it is necessary to explore effective ways to solve the unreasonable high income problem of monopoly enterprises, so as to improve the distribution system and standardize the order of income distribution.

Based on the data of A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2003 to 2015, this paper takes the implementation of the Anti-monopoly Law as the research opportunity to construct a DID model to empirically test its impact on employee wages. It is found that: Compared with enterprises with a low monopoly degree, the implementation of the Anti-monopoly Law significantly reduces the wage level of employees in enterprises with a high monopoly degree, and the conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests. The influence mechanism analysis finds that the Anti-monopoly Law weakens employee wages by reducing the monopoly profit margin and information asymmetry of enterprises with a high monopoly degree. The heterogeneity test finds that the inhibitory effect of the Anti-monopoly Law on employee wages is mainly reflected in enterprises in industries with a weak degree of market competition, enterprises in regions with a low degree of administrative intervention, state-owned enterprises, and enterprises with a high tax scale.

The marginal contributions of this paper are mainly as follows: (1) It examines the impact effect of the implementation of the Anti-monopoly Law on the wage payment of monopoly enterprises and its specific role path, which enriches the research on the microeconomic consequences of the Anti-monopoly Law from the perspective of income distribution, and expands the research on the influencing factors of employee wages from the perspective of competition policy. (2) The existing literature mainly discusses the phenomenon that monopoly will lead to unreasonably high wage payments, lacking research on how to solve this phenomenon; while this paper takes the implementation of the Anti-monopoly Law as the starting point and finds that it can effectively suppress the high wage payment of monopoly enterprises, making up for the shortcoming of the existing literature. (3) From the perspective of competition policy, it provides empirical evidence and theoretical support for the government to improve the distribution system, standardize the order of income distribution, and narrow the income gap. This paper finds that the implementation of the Anti-monopoly Law can reduce the employee wages of monopoly enterprises, and then narrow the income gap between monopoly enterprises and non-monopoly enterprises. Therefore, government departments can make full use of the Anti-monopoly Law to regulate the unreasonably high income of monopoly enterprises, and then form a standardized and reasonable income distribution pattern.