Digital Technology Availability and Innovation Performance in Chinese Retail Enterprises: Mechanisms, Heterogeneity, and Evidence from Shanghai and Shenzhen A-Share Listed Firms, 2015–2022

Abstract

This study employs panel data from Chinese Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed retail enterprises spanning the period from 2015 to 2022—covering 112 firms and 896 firm-year observations after excluding ST firms and those with missing key variables—and through empirical analysis investigates the specific impact of digital technology availability on firm innovation performance and its underlying mechanisms. Digital technology availability is measured through textual analysis of annual reports, capturing the frequency of keywords related to artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, blockchain, and the Internet of Things, while innovation performance is proxied by the number of patent applications and R&D intensity. The empirical findings reveal that digital technology availability exerts a significant positive effect on the performance improvement of retail enterprises: the baseline regression coefficient is 0.147 and significant at the 1% level, indicating that a one-standard-deviation increase in digital technology availability raises innovation performance by approximately 15.3% of its sample mean. This conclusion remains stable following a series of robustness checks, including lagging the explanatory variable by one period, substituting the dependent variable with invention patent grants, employing propensity score matching, and using instrumental variable estimation to address potential endogeneity.