The Impact of Digital Transformation on New Quality Productivity of Enterprises: Evidence from Chinese Coal Listed Companies

Digital–intelligent technologies and their extensive application across real-world scenarios are profoundly reshaping traditional industries while fostering emerging and future industries, becoming a key engine for industrial intelligence and the development of new quality productive forces. Advancing new quality productive forces in coal enterprises is a core pathway to overcome bottlenecks such as high safety risks and stringent environmental constraints in the traditional coal sector and to achieve high-quality industrial development; digital–intelligent transformation provides critical support for this process. Using panel data from 30 Chinese A-share listed coal companies from 2012 to 2024, this study empirically examines the impact of digital–intelligent transformation on the development of new quality productive forces in coal enterprises, and explores the mediating role of resource allocation efficiency and the moderating role of local governments’ economic performance assessment pressure. The results show that digital–intelligent transformation significantly promotes the development of new quality productive forces in coal enterprises. Resource allocation efficiency plays a mediating role in this relationship, accounting for 14.89% of the total effect. Moreover, local economic performance assessment pressure negatively moderates the effect of digital–intelligent transformation on the development of new quality productive forces, and this negative moderating effect persists along the mediating pathway via resource allocation efficiency. This study aims to uncover the internal mechanism through which digital–intelligent transformation promotes new quality productive forces in coal enterprises, providing a new theoretical basis and research perspective for coal enterprises to cultivate new quality productive forces.