The impact of strong financial supervision on corporate data asset holdings

Strengthening financial supervision and guiding financial resources to support the real economy are important to achieve a high-quality financial development. This paper uses the ‘New Asset Management Regulations’ as a quasi-natural experiment to explore changes in corporate data asset holdings under the background of strong financial supervision. The study finds that after the implementation of the ‘New Asset Management Regulations,’ enterprises with a higher degree of financialization significantly increased their holdings of corporate data assets. Mechanism analysis shows that strong financial supervision relieves corporate financing constraints by suppressing the scale of shadow banking and reducing financing costs, thereby promoting the increase in corporate data asset holdings. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the promoting effect of strong financial supervision on corporate data asset holdings is more significant in enterprises with stronger digital leadership, in high-tech industries, and in enterprises with a higher concentration of fintech companies. Further analysis shows that strong financial supervision significantly promotes the increase in self-use data asset holdings, while its impact on transactional data asset holdings is not significant. This paper provides micro-level evidence for understanding how regulatory policies influence corporate asset structures and offers important insights for improving financial governance and promoting the development of the digital economy.