Comment Letter and Productivity Dispersion
Description
Our sample begins with all Chinese A-share listed firms covered by the China Stock Market and Accounting Research database from 2015 to 2024. Although the direct-filing reform was introduced in 2013 and comment letters were required to be disclosed from late 2014, the exchanges’ disclosure remained fragmented in the early years. We therefore start in 2015, the first year for which complete and consistently disclosed comment letter data are available across both exchanges. We exclude financial firms, given their distinct reporting and regulatory environment, and drop firm-year observations with missing values or apparent data errors in the variables required for the analysis. Because the explanatory variables are lagged by one year in our subsequent analyses, the effective estimation sample spans the industry-year observations from 2016 to 2024. The final sample consists of 394 industry-year observations, aggregated from 13,173 firm-year observations.