Smart Courts and Corporate Innovation in China

In April 2017, the Supreme People’s Court issued the Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of Smart Courts, outlining the specific goals and requirements for a smart court. In April 2018, the Supreme People’s Court released the Evaluation Report on Smart Court Construction, providing a detailed evaluation of smart court construction across more than 3,000 intermediate and grassroots courts. Since then, the government has published annual evaluation reports. This study selects 2018–2023 as the research period and the following samples are excluded: samples from the financial industry; samples with severe data deficiencies, such as missing smart court construction ratings or tax uncertainty data; companies that relocated during the sample period; and “special treatment” companies. All continuous variables in the sample are winsorized at the 1st and 99th percentiles to eliminate the influence of outliers and obtained a final sample comprising 12,121 firm-year observations.