Abstract:
"Stabilizing employment, enterprises, markets, and expectations" represents a critical contemporary imperative. Whether digital government construction can shape a transparent and predictable institutional environment and facilitate the formation of stable and optimistic corporate development expectations warrants in-depth investigation. Using listed companies on Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets as samples and taking the launch of provincial integrated government service platforms as a quasi-natural experiment, this study finds that digital government construction significantly improves corporate expectations, a conclusion that remains robust after controlling for a series of endogeneity concerns. The mechanisms operate through: (1) Enhancing government transparency and strengthening corporate expectations regarding institutional environment stability. Digital government construction standardizes, aggregates, integrates, and dynamically updates information dispersed across functional departments to form a unified policy information resource pool; transforms the regulatory paradigm from "ex-post punishment" to "whole-process transparent supervision", cultivating a fair competitive market environment; and constructs digitalized and intelligent government-enterprise communication channels that promptly address corporate inquiries and fully incorporate corporate appeals and suggestions. (2) Reducing corporate institutional transaction costs and decreasing non-productive resource consumption. Digital government construction leverages big data and process digitalization technologies to achieve cross-departmental data sharing and organic integration of business processes, reducing costs associated with inter-departmental communication and duplicate submissions; utilizes artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies to promote integrated, standardized, and modularized restructuring of business processes, establishing structured approval rule repositories that substantially compress approval cycles. Further analysis indicates that the expectation-improving effect of digital government construction is more pronounced for enterprises with weaker government-business ties, higher levels of digital transformation, and more developed regional digital infrastructure. Digital government construction significantly promotes increases in corporate physical investment, labor employment, and innovation input, achieving "stable investment", "stable employment", and "innovation promotion" on the foundation of "stable expectations". This study provides novel evidence for understanding the intrinsic relationship between government governance modernization and corporate expectations, and offers insights for governments to enhance institutional supply quality and optimize expectation management through digital technologies.
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