The Impact of Enterprise IT Investment on Corporate Performance: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

This paper uses econometrics to examine the influence of information technology investment using public firm data from China. Specifically, we observe whether there are differences in IT investment between developing countries and developed countries theoretically, and how the financial market performed after massive IT investment in China. The results are based on a sample of 166 IT investment announcements selected from the 3740 possible IT investment announcements spanning 2009 to 2017. Over the announcement period, we find positive effect for the full sample and the innovative IT investments, but not in the case of non-innovative investments. When it comes to types of listed companies, only the IT investments of growth enterprises market listed companies have a significant impact on stock price performance. Compared with previous studies, which only pay attention to the longitudinal position of firms, our research also examined the impact of IT investment on firms’ horizontal position, namely the changes of market before and after the investment in the time-line.

KEYWORDS:

• IT investment
• firm performance
• event study
• developing country

Notes

1. For the present purposes, a developing country is defined as a low or lower-middle-income country as defined in the 2018 edition of the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database. Although China’s GDP is large, it has the typical characteristics of low per capita GDP ($9630 in 2018) and low productivity in developing countries due to its large population. Accordingly, in academia, China is generally regarded as a developing country (Ali et al., 2019; Cesur, Tekin, & Ulker, 2018; Ma & Lee, 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.71531013; 71490720; 71401047.

Notes on contributors

Xiangbin Yan

Xiangbin Yan, Professor at the Donlinks School of Economics and Management, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China.

Guang Yu

Guang Yu, Professor at the School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China.