Data Resources Empowering Enterprise Financial Activities and Financing Costs: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

: With the rapid development of China's digital economy, at present, harnessing the power of data resources has become a key factor in the improvement of enterprise competitiveness and financial health. The economic effect of the use of data resources on the financial activities and financing costs of enterprises will be studied in this paper. Based on the theory of information asymmetry and the resource-based view of the firm, we believe that enterprises with strong data resource capabilities can reduce information asymmetry with creditors and investors to lower both the cost of debt and the cost of equity. Based on the panel data of 1,654 Chinese A-share listed companies from 2020 to 2023, and after obtaining 5,847 firm-year observations, we construct a Data Resource Index to measure the data resource intensity of enterprises. OLS regression with industry and year fixed effects shows that a 1 standard deviation increase in the Data Resource Index is associated with a 0.20% decrease in the cost of debt and a 0.43% drop in the cost of equity. Due to various reasons, although the financing costs of non-state-owned enterprises have fallen to some extent, they still have a higher degree of information asymmetry than that for state-owned enterprises. The above results provide new empirical evidence of the financial value of data resources and offer some references for the strategies of digital transformation in enterprises, capital market disclosure regulations, etc.