Using the implementation of the Labor Contract Law as a natural experiment, this paper empirically analyzes the impacts of Chinas labor protection on corporate leverage differentiation. The results show that the implementation of the “Labor Contract Law” will promotes the leverage level of stateowned corporations and reduces the leverage level of nonstateowned corporations and mainly affects the shortterm leverage. What's more, the impacts are more obviously in more laborintensive corporations. From the perspective of the mechanism, the increase in labor protection mainly affects the corporations leverage by affecting the labor management flexibility of corporations. However, for stateowned corporations, the impact of changes in labor management on leverage is not obvious. Local government intervention is the main reason that the increase of labor protection promotes stateowned corporations' leverage.

 labor protection , leverage , laborintensive , local government intervention