Data trading platforms and corporate information disclosure quality: evidence from China

This paper takes the establishment of China’s data trading platforms as a quasi-natural experiment, and examines their impacts on corporate information disclosure quality based on the data of listed companies from 2012 to 2025. The empirical results show that the launch of data trading platforms significantly improves the quality of corporate information disclosure, which verifies the positive effect of data on corporate information disclosure. Such platforms exert influences mainly through three channels: encouraging firms to accumulate high-quality data, improving their capabilities for information disclosure, and strengthening their willingness to disclose information. Further analysis indicates that the improvement in information disclosure quality can effectively reduce abnormal audit fees and alleviate corporate financing constraints. This paper provides a data-oriented theoretical perspective for research on information disclosure quality, and offers practical implications for the construction of data trading platforms and the optimization of corporate information disclosure.