Exploring the pathways to enhance corporate energy resilience: The role of supply chain digitization

Strengthening the resilience of energy systems to risks has become a critical priority in addressing contemporary challenges, and supply chain digitization offers valuable insights into achieving this goal. This paper examines the effects of policy shifts on corporate energy resilience by leveraging China's supply chain innovation and application pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment. Based on data from Chinese listed firms from 2013 to 2022, the analysis demonstrates that supply chain digitization significantly improves corporate energy resilience. This conclusion remains robust across a series of validation procedures, including placebo tests, propensity score matching, and alternative machine learning algorithms. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that the effects of supply chain digitization are pronounced among firms in the eastern and western regions, as well as for mature, labor-intensive, and capital-intensive firms. Additionally, our findings identify easing financial constraints and the promotion of technological innovation as key mechanisms through which supply chain digitization influences energy resilience. Extended quantile regression and machine learning-based tests of average treatment effects reveal heterogeneous impacts of supply chain digitization on energy resilience among firms at different quantile levels, indicating a dynamic interrelationship. This study advances understanding of how supply chain digitizationstrengthens firms' capacity to withstand, adapt to, and recover from energy-related risks.