Internet Plus government service platform and corporate digital transformation
Description
In 2017, China enacted the Internet Plus Government Services Platform Technology System Construction Guide , which standardized the construction of the platform. The digital economy initiative had been proposed in 2016, but given the lag between policy issuance and implementation, firms began to significantly promote CDT in 2017, when the government also introduced the Guidelines on Deepening Internet Plus Advanced Manufacturing to Develop the Industrial Internet . We select A-share listed firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2017 to 2022 and process the sample as follows. We exclude special-treatment firms and firms in the financial sector to avoid the influence of special firms and industries, and we exclude observations with missing data on the main variables. The final sample contains 16,488 firm-year observations. The platform data are manually collected from each prefecture-level city's government website work and supervision annual reports. Because these reports are included in the performance evaluations conducted by the General Office of the State Council , the data are released in a timely manner, use standardized indicators, and come from an authoritative source. Corporate financial data are obtained from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research database, and CDT data are manually collected from listed firms' annual reports. To mitigate the influence of outliers, all continuous variables are winsorized at the 1% level.