Establishment of a Personal Data Protection System and Mergers and Acquisitions Behavior
Description
We use M&A transactions by A-share listed firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges over 2015–2021. The start year reflects the rollout of China’s national big-data strategy and the rapid development of corporate data assets (Chen et al., 2024). The sample ends in 2021 because the PIPL, passed on August 20, 2021 and effective on November 1, 2021, made personal information protection a statutory obligation thereafter. Before the PIPL, Chinese rules on personal information imposed general, principle-based duties without comprehensive organizational or procedural requirements , so establishing a PDPS during the sample period reflected voluntary self-regulation rather than legal compliance. We exclude: (1) deals in which the acquirer is not listed; (2) acquirers in the financial and insurance industries; (3) Special Treatment firms; (4) asset divestitures, asset replacements, and debt restructurings; (5) deals below RMB 1 million; and (6) observations with missing values. When a firm completes multiple deals in a year, only the first is retained, so each observation corresponds to an individual transaction, and the estimates concern deal-level performance rather than annualized acquisition programs. This rule keeps one announcement event per firm-year and avoids overlapping short-run event windows within the same firm-year. The final sample contains 4,294 M&A transactions. Continuous variables are winsorized at the 1% and 99% levels. Data are from the CSMAR database, with corporate social responsibility ratings from Hexun.com and patent data from the National Intellectual Property Administration of China.