Aug 2026· Information Resources Management Journal· Vol 39, pp. 1-20· 0 citations· 32 references
TL;DR
The findings revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship where early transformation raises risks and lowers audit quality up to a critical point (Digital Transformation (DT)=1.58)—after which standardized governance reduces risks.
Abstract
This study explored the nonlinear link between digital transformation and audit quality in manufacturing alongside supply chain concentration effects. It was conducted because traditional linear research ignores complex digitalization risks, like algorithmic black boxes, failing to fit manufacturing's unique financial integration contexts. The authors applied a framework combining mathematical deduction of misstatement risks, game theory, and panel regression on data from 12,450 Chinese A-share manufacturers from 2012 to 2022. The findings revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship where early transformation raises risks and lowers audit quality up to a critical point (Digital Transformation (DT)=1.58)—after which standardized governance reduces risks. Additionally, high supply chain concentration accelerates this benefit. This means managers must strategically pace information technology investments around this threshold, while auditors should adapt resource allocation to specific digital maturity stages to safely capture transparency dividends.
The construction industry has long been constrained by a reliance on tacit knowledge and fragmented collaboration, leading to pronounced labor misallocation. The rapid acceleration of digital transformation offers a potential pathway to mitigate this challenge. This study aims to investigate how digital transformation improves labor allocation efficiency in construction enterprises and identifies the underlying micro-level governance mechanisms.
Using a sample of A-share listed construction enterprises in China from 2011 to 2023, this study constructs a digital transformation index via textual analysis of corporate annual reports. The index is then incorporated into a labor allocation efficiency model and estimated using fixed-effects regressions, with multiple robustness checks to ensure the reliability of the findings.
Digital transformation significantly curtails inefficient deviations in labor input, thereby enhancing overall labor allocation efficiency. Mechanism analyses reveal two primary pathways: driving human capital upgrading by increasing the proportion of highly skilled and educated personnel and facilitating organizational flattening by reducing redundant managerial layers. These pathways mitigate agency conflicts, accelerate decision-making and exhibit a mutually reinforcing effect. Heterogeneity analyses demonstrate that this corrective impact is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and during advanced stages of digitalization, while remaining unaffected by firm size.
The findings suggest that managers should perceive digitalization not merely as a technological upgrade but as an organizational-level structural transformation. Optimizing allocation efficiency requires the synchronized advancement of organizational restructuring and human capital upgrading so that both evolve in alignment with the digitalization process.
The primary contribution of this study lies in shifting the analytical focus of existing labor research. Rather than examining labor investment primarily through the lens of financing constraints, this research demonstrates that digital transformation helps reduce structural mismatches by improving organizational governance and human capital structure. Consequently, it provides novel empirical evidence on the functional mechanisms of digital technology within traditional, high-friction industries.
Ran Duan, Yi-Chong Zhou· Management Decision· 0 citations
While governments increasingly invest in digitalisation to boost tax compliance, the actual impact of these technologies on the front lines of tax auditing remains questionable. This study investigates the paradoxical relationship between information system capabilities, regulatory frameworks, and tax audit effectiveness in developing economies, focusing on Indonesia. Using survey data from 100 tax auditors using via Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), we evaluate the core drivers of audit effectiveness. Contrary to prevailing digital-first narratives, our findings reveal that current information systems in Indonesia do not significantly enhance auditors' ability to recover tax underpayments. Instead, the regulatory structure remains the dominant factor influencing audit execution. These results highlight a critical disconnect: to optimize revenue collection, policymakers must prioritise regulatory simplification to empower auditors, while undertaking strategic overhauls of IT investments to ensure digital tools generate operationally relevant, actionable outputs.
Kristian Agung Prasetyo, Teguh Warsito, Agus Puji Priyono· Veredas do Direito· 0 citations
Global industrial chains continue to face successive shocks from geopolitical conflicts, trade protectionism, and various unforeseen risks. Supply chain resilience is no longer confined to a management issue at the corporate operational level; it has risen to become a core strategic priority for national industrial security. The iterative implementation of digital technologies-such as the Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain-provides new analytical perspectives and practical pathways for building risk-resilient supply chain systems.This paper systematically traces the evolution of the concept of supply chain resilience, clarifying the logical progression of academic understanding from static post-disaster recovery to dynamic adaptation across the entire lifecycle. By integrating foundational theories such as dynamic capabilities, organizational information processing, and complex co-evolution, it identifies four mainstream pathways through which digital technologies empower supply chain resilience: information sharing, collaborative optimization, resource coordination, and risk prevention and control.At the same time, this paper dissects the underlying causes of the significant heterogeneity in the effects of digital empowerment from three dimensions: regional institutional environments, industrial network structures, and internal corporate characteristics. Although existing literature has accumulated a wealth of research findings, there remain research gaps, including insufficient analysis of the interaction among multiple mechanisms, a scarcity of dynamic time-series studies, weak empirical evidence regarding specific industry segments and network structures, and a lack of critical discussion on the potential risks of digitalization.Accordingly, future research could establish a dynamic, integrated analytical framework that synthesizes multiple theories to distinguish the differentiated empowerment pathways of various digital technologies; advance cross-industry, multi-tier network comparative empirical studies to refine standardized measurement systems and hybrid research paradigms; and dialectically examine the dual impacts of digital transformation, balancing its benefits with the risks it entails.
Yu-Ting You, Chu-Chu Sun· Scientific Journal of Econom...· 0 citations
This paper examines the relationship between supply chain digitalization and firm-level supply chain resilience using the staggered rollout of China’s Supply Chain Innovation and Application Pilot Program as a quasi-natural experiment. Based on panel data for Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms from 2012 to 2023, the difference-in-differences estimates indicate that policy exposure is associated with a statistically significant increase in supply chain resilience. The coefficient remains stable across parallel trends tests, placebo exercises, additional controls, high-dimensional fixed effects, and policy-selection diagnostics. Because pilot assignment followed an evaluation process, rather than randomization, the estimates remain subject to possible selection on unobserved characteristics. Subgroup regressions yield larger positive coefficients for firms in less marketized regions, non-state-owned enterprises, and mature firms. Sobel tests support the financing constraint pathway, whereas the information transparency pathway is only marginally significant. Asset turnover, the operating cycle, and inventory alignment are associated with resilience in the outcome equations, but the corresponding first-stage policy coefficients are not robust in the preferred firm- and year-fixed effect specifications. The findings document a positive quasi-experimental association between supply chain digitalization and resilience, while highlighting the institutional and firm-level conditions that shape the estimated relationship.
Bingbing Wang, T. Wei· Sustainability· 0 citations
This study examines how digital supply chain capabilities (IoT, blockchain, etc.) streamline firms' regionalization initiatives.
The study adopts a rigorous qualitative, cross-industry research design. Forty semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers from 11 manufacturing firms (4 pharmaceuticals, 4 food and beverage and 3 electronics firms). Participating firms were in the initial-to-mid stage of regionalizing their supply chain operations.
The cross-industry analysis reveals that the reported regionalization outcomes/benefits are enabled through digitally embedded information-processing and evidence-production routines rather than geographic proximity alone. The data analysis revealed six reported outcomes across three industries, including enhanced resilience (recoverability), stronger supplier ecosystem, ESG outcomes, quality compliance and switching flexibility, revenue protection and market access. The data also revealed mechanisms leading to these outcomes, including reduced data-to-decision latency, coordinated response routines, traceability and audit-ready documentation, digital quality governance, reusable qualification, data-driven communication, continuity signalling and structured exception/assurance communication, amongst others.
This study develops theory from a qualitative sample of 40 interviews and is therefore not intended to produce statistically generalizable findings. In addition, because the participating firms were in the initial-to-mid stages of their regionalization initiatives, reported outcomes were still emerging rather than fully realized or measurable. The findings should therefore be interpreted as explaining the mechanisms through which digital supply chain capabilities support regionalization rather than as providing definitive evidence of long-term performance effects.
Managers can use the identified mechanisms to design regionalization programmes around faster exception communication, reusable qualification evidence and audit-ready traceability routines. The results also guide industry-specific priorities such as compliance evidence cycles in pharmaceuticals, qualification/engineering information integration in electronics and information-enabled cold-chain control loops in food and beverage.
Prior regionalization research mainly treats digitalization as technology adoption, offering limited process-level insight into how digital supply chain capabilities bolster regionalization. This study advances the literature by theorizing digital supply chain capability (DSSC) as a set of information-processing and evidence-production mechanisms that explain regionalization outcomes under varying regulatory intensity, technological specificity and perishability.
A. Butt· Industrial Management &...· 0 citations
Digital technologies are increasingly reshaping firms' operational processes, information management, and resource allocation practices. As digital transformation becomes more deeply embedded in business activities, its influence on corporate investment decisions has attracted growing scholarly attention. Drawing on data from Chinese A-share listed companies during 2013-2024, this study investigates the relationship between digital transformation and investment efficiency. The results show that firms with a higher level of digital transformation exhibit significantly lower inefficient investment and consequently higher investment efficiency. The estimated effect remains robust after a series of additional analyses addressing potential endogeneity and model specification issues. Further examination suggests that the positive effect of digital transformation is partly attributable to the alleviation of financing constraints and the reduction of agency costs. By improving information flows and strengthening governance mechanisms, digital transformation contributes to more efficient capital allocation within firms. The study extends existing knowledge on the economic outcomes of digital transformation and offers evidence relevant to both corporate investment management and digital economy policy design.
Yaru Jiang, Ningpeng Jiang· Journal of Applied Economics...· 0 citations