A Study of the Impact of Data Assets on the Investment Efficiency of Firms

With the advent of the digital economy era, data assets play a pivotal role for enterprises. Therefore, this paper selects the data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2013-2022 to conduct a quantitative study on data assets and explore the impact of enterprises' data assets on their investment efficiency. It is found that data assets significantly contribute to firms' inefficient investment. This finding still holds after the robustness test. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that data assets can promote overinvestment in non-state-owned firms; they contribute more to inefficient investment in growing and declining firms. The mechanism test suggests that data assets promote firms inefficient investment due to promoting firms financing constraints and real earnings management. Therefore, the findings of this paper provide certain clues and suggestions for enterprises to dialectically view data assets to maximize their effectiveness and avoid data bubbles.