Abstract:

Enterprises play an important role in the development and transformation of the macro digital economy. Based on the micro data of A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2010 to 2019, this paper examines the impact and mechanism of marketization process on the digital transformation of enterprises. The empirical results show that the process of marketization can significantly promote the digital transformation of enterprises, and the results remain robust after reconstructing the core dependent and independent variables, controlling for high-dimensional fixed effects, excluding provincial capitals and municipalities directly under the central government samples, and excluding the strategic disclosure behavior of enterprises. A exogenous shock based on the negative list system for market access pilot policy, assessing the impact of omitted variables, instrumental variables, the Heckman two-step method and the PSM method can partially rule out endogeneity problems. The marketization process affects the digital transformation of enterprises by mitigating factor distortions, improving market competition, and reducing policies’ uncertainty, with heterogeneity at the levels of firms’ state, firms’ transaction cost, government governance, and firm size. The structural effect test found that the marketization process has a significant promoting effect on the digital transformation of the enterprises’ technology and application layers, as well as the digital transformation of the action and prediction layers, with a relatively significant impact on the technology digital transformation and action digital transformation. The findings of this paper support the idea that deepening market-based reforms can lead the digital transformation of enterprises, but at the same time, the government’s visible hand should be used as a complement to effectively play a mutually beneficial role.

Key words:

digital economics, digital transformation, marketization process, negative list system for market access