Data Assetization and Corporate Sustainable Development Performance: A Data Governance Perspective for Sustainable Digital Transformation

As intelligent technologies become embedded in corporate operations, data are evolving from business by-products into strategic resources for decision-making and value creation. Yet expanding data volumes do not automatically generate sustainable value. Firms must govern, integrate, and deploy dispersed data as organizational assets. Data assetization constitutes this transformation, linking digital transformation with corporate sustainable development, yet its performance implications and boundary conditions remain underexplored. Drawing on resource orchestration theory, the institution-based view, corporate governance theory, and principal–agent theory, this study analyzes 29,005 firm-year observations from Chinese A-share listed firms during 2015–2024. The study constructs a BERT-based contextual measure of data assetization and estimates two-way fixed-effects models. Data assetization is positively associated with sustainable development performance, and the finding remains robust to alternative measures, sample adjustments, and a lagged specification. This association is stronger under higher data factor marketization, internal control quality, and audit quality, and among non-state-owned and high-technology firms. Both own-use- and transaction-oriented data assetization are positively associated with performance, with the latter association significantly stronger. This study reframes sustainable digital transformation as a data governance process, identifies multilevel institutional and governance boundary conditions, and provides a context-sensitive measure. The findings inform corporate data governance and data-market policy.