blockchain technology and corporate investment

The financial data for this study comes from the CSMAR and WIND databases. The use of blockchain technology by listed companies is obtained from annual reports, news reports, search engines, and prospectuses of listed companies through text analyses based on computer technology. The initial samples are formed by selecting all A-share listed companies in both Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2015 to 2018. The samples are then filtered by: (1) deleting the firms in financial and insurance industry; (2) removing the abnormal companies, such as the “special treated firms” and “particular transfer firms”; (3) deleting the firms of their asset-liability ratio greater than 1 and the firms with missing values of other variables; (4) winsorising the continuous variables at the 1st and 99th percentiles, in order to eliminate potential outlier effects. Finally, the samples cover 6,323 firm-year observations.