Establishment of a Personal Data Protection System and Corporate Innovation

The Personal Information Protection Law was officially implemented in China in November 2021. Although relevant laws and regulations for guidance exist, establishing this system in enterprises was voluntary. Therefore, we select listed A-share companies in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2008 to 2020 to constitute the initial sample and carry out the following processes: (1) exclude the financial and insurance industry, (2) exclude samples of abnormal companies (e.g., special treatment), and (3) exclude samples of companies with asset-liability ratios greater than 1. All continuous variables were winsorized at the 1% level to avoid the influence of outliers. Finally, 9,285 annual company observations were obtained.