Data Factor Marketization, New Quality Productive Forces, and Organic Composition of Capital: A Marxist Political Economy Perspective

The marketization of data as a tradable production factor has reshaped firms’ production structures, yet its impact on the organic composition of capital remains insufficiently understood. Drawing on a Marxist political economy perspective, this study examines how data factor marketization affects capital deepening among Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2024. Exploiting the staggered establishment of municipal data trading platforms as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences framework and find that data factor marketization significantly increases firms’ organic composition of capital, measured by the ratio of net fixed assets to labor compensation, by 0.291 units. This effect remains robust across alternative measurements, sample restrictions, and heterogeneity-robust estimators. Mechanism analyses reveal that the effect operates through new quality productive forces, including workforce skill upgrading, accumulation of intangible and ecological assets, and adoption of digital and green technologies. Cross-sectional analyses show that the capital-deepening effect exists among firms with varying human capital intensity, while its magnitude varies across industries with different capital intensities. Further analyses indicate that higher organic composition of capital increases the surplus value rate, reduces the labor income share, and lowers the profit rate, providing evidence consistent with Marx’s tendency of the rate of profit to fall.