Corporate Personal Data Protection and Goodwill Impairment

This study employs a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms spanning the period 2016 to 2023, with financial and governance data sourced from the CSMAR database. Subsequent regulatory milestones—including the 2019 Data Security Management Measures (Draft for Comment), the 2021 Data Security Law, and the 2021 Personal Information Protection Law—further solidified the legal infrastructure governing corporate data practices. This temporal scope, therefore, captures the critical period of institutional development and corporate adaptation, enabling a comprehensive analysis of PDPS evolution and its economic consequences.
The sample construction adheres to the following criteria: (1) Firms designated as Special Treatment are excluded to mitigate potential distortions arising from financial distress; (2) Financial institutions are omitted due to fundamental differences in business models, regulatory environments, and goodwill accounting practices that could introduce confounding heterogeneity; (3) Observations with missing values for core model variables are removed. To address the influence of extreme values, all continuous variables are winsorized at the 1st and 99th percentiles. The final dataset comprises an unbalanced panel of 11,965 firm-year observations, representing 2,044 unique listed entities.