Can Enterprise Digital Transformation Improve Risk-taking?

With the rapid development of digital economy,enterprises have joined the digital transformation camp.According to the data,53% of the departments listed "digital transformation" as "important work" or "key projects" in the "14th Five-Year Plan" for digital transformation,which enabled many enterprises to resume work and resume production and sustainable development,and was the "survival answer" written by many enterprises in the face of the "big test" of the epidemic.First of all,the digital transformation relies on its complete digital capability,reshaping the core competitiveness of enterprises in an all-round way,stimulating endogenous power to realize further speed-up of development,which is an important power to stabilize China’s economic growth in the post-epidemic era;Secondly,for enterprises,a higher level of risk-taking means that enterprises prefer to invest in research and development projects,which can enhance enterprise value,promote social and technological progress,and thus promote economic growth.From this perspective,both the digital transformation and the level of corporate risk-taking can effectively promote economic growth.Therefore,it is of great significance to study how digital transformation affects the level of corporate risk-taking for the long-term and stable development of our economy.Then,how does the digital transformation of enterprises affect the level of enterprise risk-taking? This thesis takes the data of China A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2021 as the research sample,and mainly does the following work: First of all,the relationship between the digital transformation of enterprises and the risk-taking of enterprises is preliminarily investigated,and from the perspective of financing constraints and enterprise value,studies the impact of corporate digital transformation on corporate risk-taking by influencing financing constraints and agency costs,further enriching the intermediary effect between corporate digital transformation and corporate risk-taking;Secondly,this thesis discusses the moderating effect of economic policy uncertainty and analyst coverage on the relationship between the digital transformation of enterprises and the level of enterprise risktaking;Thirdly,the heterogeneity analysis of the relationship between digital transformation and corporate risk-taking is carried out,and the differences in the impact of digital transformation on corporate risk-taking are studied under the conditions of differences in corporate scale,regional differences,differences in the nature of property rights and differences in life cycle.Finally,the robustness of the experimental results is tested,and whether the experimental results are robust or not is verified by the tool variable method,tendency score matching method and substitution variable method.In addition,this thesis also studies the economic consequences of the impact of digital transformation on corporate risktaking.Through the empirical test,the following research conclusions are drawn:(1)The digital transformation of enterprises has significantly improved the level of enterprise risk-taking and is still valid after a series of robustness tests;(2)The mechanism test shows that easing corporate financing constraints and enhancing corporate value are the path mechanism between digital transformation and risk taking;(3)The increase of economic uncertainty and analyst coverage will promote and inhibit the positive correlation between the digital transformation of enterprises and enterprise risk taking respectively;(4)Heterogeneity analysis shows that the moderating effect of digital transformation on corporate risk-taking is more significant in small-scale enterprises,non-eastern enterprises,non-state-owned enterprises,growing and mature enterprises.