Against the backdrop of accelerated transformation in the international industrial landscape, the global industrial chain is undergoing large-scale deconstruction, decoupling, and restructuring. The U.S.led “targeted decoupling” in high-tech sectors has subjected Chinese industries to dual pressure: the “high-end backflow” from developed countries and the “mid-to-low-end diversion” from developing countries. The core of this global industrial chains restructuring lies in competition over national technological capabilities. Enterprises that prioritize data as a core production factor for innovation and business model transformation can rapidly accumulate data assets, thereby adapting to the mainstream innovation paradigm driven by digital transformation in the digital economy.
Following traditional production factors such as labor, capital, and land, data has been formally recognized as a new production factor. Data assets refer to resource-based assets that exist within enterprises in the form of intangible assets, formed through the collection, processing, and accumulation of data elements. Their positive role in facilitating information flow and enhancing enterprise efficiency should not be overlooked. In this context, this study uses Chinese listed companies from 2008 to 2022 as the research sample to examine how corporate data assets affect total factor productivity (TFP) from the perspectives of information linkage and industrial chain connectivity. The results show that expanding the scale of data assets enhances TFP, with inter-firm information linkage serving as an effective mediating mechanism. This effect is observed across firms of different sizes, industries, and intangible asset ratios, and is particularly pronounced in large enterprises and those with high proportions of intangible assets. Furthermore, the impact of data assets on TFP is deepened by industrial chain linkage—downstream industry digital transformation, market competition intensity, and customer concentration all positively moderate the productivity-enhancing effect of corporate data assets.
Compared with existing literature, this study contributes in two main aspects: First, in terms of research perspective, it enriches the research on the economic effects of data assets by exploring how corporate data assets influence TFP, providing new insights for the orderly advancement of corporate data assetization and addressing gaps in existing research. Second, in terms of research framework, this study identifies industrial chain linkage as an important pathway through which data assets enhance enterprise TFP. It examines the mediating mechanism from the perspective of information linkage and the moderating mechanisms from the perspective of upstream-downstream digital transformation and market environment. This offers a novel theoretical perspective, thereby providing a new theoretical perspective for explaining the TFP-enhancing effect of data assets.
This study identifies the impact and mechanisms through which corporate data assets affect TFP. It suggests that fully leveraging the productivity-enhancing effects of data assets requires optimized institutional design, establishment of multi-level investment mechanisms, and construction of digital collaboration platforms. Multiple measures should be taken to comprehensively improve enterprise production efficiency and maximize the synergistic value of data elements.
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