Corporate AI Safety Governance and Firm Productivity

This study uses Chinese A-share listed firms from 2019 to 2024 as the initial sample. The starting year corresponds to the establishment of China's National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Governance Expert Committee and the issuance of the Governance Principles for a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence, which formally introduced AI safety governance as a core topic in national policy and marked the beginning of China's systematic governance framework. We apply the following sample filters and exclude: (1) firms designated as Special Treatment during the sample period; (2) firms in the financial industry; (3) observations with missing values for relevant variables. All continuous variables are winsorized at the 1 percent level to mitigate the influence of outliers. The final sample consists of 18,637 firm-year observations covering 4,421 firms.
Patent text data are obtained from the IPRDB Intellectual Property Database. Annual report texts and corporate social responsibility report texts are collected from Cninfo . Official news text data and financial data are both obtained from the CSMAR database.