In the context of the digital economy, the government's digital transformation has become a crucial institutional arrangement for advancing the modernization of national governance and optimizing market operations. However, its impact mechanism on corporate long-term capital structure remains to be systematically examined. Based on the micro-level data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2006 to 2023, this study treats the pilot programs of government digital governance as a quasi-natural experiment and constructs a multi-period Difference-in-Differences (DID) model to systematically investigate the impact of government digital transformation on patient capital and its underlying mechanisms. The empirical results indicate that government digital transformation significantly enhances the level of patient capital, a conclusion that remains robust across a series of tests, including parallel trend analysis, placebo tests, propensity score matching DID, and alternative variable specifications. Mechanism analysis reveals that government digital transformation primarily fosters the formation of patient capital through three pathways: optimizing the business environment, reducing agency costs, and alleviating financing constraints. Further heterogeneity analysis finds that this promoting effect is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and non-high-tech enterprises, with certain regional variations observed. This study provides new empirical evidence for understanding the capital market effects of government digital transformation and offers significant implications for guiding long-term capital allocation and improving the digital governance policy framework.
Gu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.