Abstract Based on the data information disclosure practices in recent years, data assets emerged as a critical economic resource in China. This study employs textual analysis of bond prospectuses to develop a measure for data assets disclosure and investigates its influence on bond pricing. Empirical results demonstrate data assets disclosure significantly reduces bond credit spreads. Mechanism tests confirm that corporate data assets disclosure reduces bond credit spreads by mitigating information asymmetry. Further analysis shows that the effect of transactional data assets is significantly stronger than that of operational data assets. Text readability analysis reveals that poor text readability weakens the mitigating effect of data assets disclosure on credit spreads. The initial disclosure of data assets led to a greater reduction in credit spreads than that of time series variation. This study advances the credit spreads literature by quantifying the informational value of data assets in bond markets.
Lyu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.