Research on the Impact Mechanism of Digital Inclusive Finance on Enterprise Value
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
The steady enhancement of enterprise value during the development process is of critical importance to firms themselves and also serves as a micro-level foundation for achieving high-quality economic development at the national level. Using A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2020 to 2025 as the research sample, this study systematically investigates the impact of digital inclusive finance on enterprise value and its underlying mechanisms. The empirical results indicate that digital inclusive finance significantly promotes enterprise value. Specifically, digital inclusive finance not only enhances enterprise value through two parallel and independent mediating channels-namely increasing R&D investment and promoting substantive innovation-but also improves enterprise value through a chain mediation mechanism in which R&D investment facilitates substantive innovation. The conclusions remain robust after endogeneity treatment and robustness tests. Further heterogeneity analysis reveals that the above impact mechanisms vary across different ownership structures and regional levels of economic development.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Mind forge Academia also operates under the Creative Commons Licence CC-BY 4.0. This allows for copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially. The premise is that you must provide appropriate citation information.
References
A. Bharadwaj, O. A. El Sawy, P. A. Pavlou and N. V. Venkatraman, "Digital business strategy: Toward a next generation of insights," MIS Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 471-482, 2013.
N. Bloom, R. Griffith and J. Van Reenen, "Do R&D tax credits work? Evidence from a panel of countries 1979-1997," Journal of Public Economics, vol. 85, no. 1, pp. 1-31, 2002.
M. McCombs, "Building consensus: The news media's agenda-setting roles," Political Communication, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 433-443, 1997.
J. Li, Q. Gan, R. Wu, C. Chen, R. Fang and J. Lai, "Causal Representation Learning for Robust and Interpretable Audit Risk Identification in Financial Systems," 2025.
R. Ying, Q. Liu, Y. Wang and Y. Xiao, "AI-Based Causal Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs for Data-Driven and Intervention-Oriented Enterprise Performance Analysis," 2025.
Q. Gan, R. Ying, D. Li, Y. Wang, Q. Liu and J. Li, "Dynamic Spatiotemporal Causal Graph Neural Networks for Corporate Revenue Forecasting," 2025.
H. Chen, Y. Lu, Y. Wei, J. Lyu, R. Wu and C. Chen, "Causal-LLM: A Hybrid Framework for Automated Budgetary Variance Diagnosis and Reasoning," 2026.
X. Yang, Y. Ni, Y. Tang, Z. Qiu, C. Wang and T. Yuan, "Graph-Structured Deep Learning Framework for Multi-task Contention Identification with High-dimensional Metrics," arXiv:2601.20389, 2026.
C. Hu, Z. Cheng, D. Wu, Y. Wang, F. Liu and Z. Qiu, "Structural Generalization for Microservice Routing Using Graph Neural Networks," 2025 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Automation Control (AIAC), pp. 278-282, 2025.
X. Song, Y. Huang, J. Guo, Y. Liu and Y. Luan, "Multi-scale Feature Fusion and Graph Neural Network Integration for Text Classification with Large Language Models," arXiv:2511.05752, 2025.
H. Chen, R. Wu, C. Chen, H. Feng, Y. Nie and Y. Lu, "Anomaly Ranking for Enterprise Finance Using Latent Structural Deviations and Reconstruction Consistency," 2026.
Y. Xing, Y. Deng, H. Liu, M. Wang, Y. Zi and X. Sun, "Contrastive Learning-Based Dependency Modeling for Anomaly Detection in Cloud Services," arXiv:2510.13368, 2025.
H. Feng, Y. Wang, R. Fang, A. Xie and Y. Wang, "Federated Risk Discrimination with Siamese Networks for Financial Transaction Anomaly Detection," Proceedings of the 2025 2nd International Conference on Digital Economy and Computer Science, pp. 231-236, 2025.
X. Yang, S. Li, K. Wu, Z. Wang, Y. Tang and Y. Li, "Adaptive Anomaly Detection in Microservice Systems via Meta-Learning," 2026.
S. Huang, Y. Zheng, Y. Zhao, R. Ying, K. Cao and X. Liang, "A Unified Meta Learning and Domain Adaptation Framework for Credit Fraud Detection in Dynamic Environments," 2026.
S. Huang, Y. Shu, K. Zhou, S. Sun, Y. Ou and R. Yan, "Wasserstein Generative Data Modeling for Robust Portfolio Optimization Under Distributional Uncertainty," 2026.
R. Liu, L. Yang, R. Zhang and S. Wang, "Generative Modeling of Human-Computer Interfaces with Diffusion Processes and Conditional Control," arXiv:2601.06823, 2026.
S. Pan and D. Wu, "Trustworthy Summarization via Uncertainty Quantification and Risk Awareness in Large Language Models," 2025 6th International Conference on Computer Vision and Data Mining (ICCVDM), pp. 523-527, 2025.
Y. Wang, "Multi-Agent Collaborative Modeling for Systemic Risk Propagation in Financial Markets: A Game-Theoretic Framework," 2026.
Y. Hu, J. Li, K. Gao, Z. Zhang, H. Zhu and X. Yan, "TrustOrch: A Dynamic Trust-Aware Orchestration Framework for Adversarially Robust Multi-Agent Collaboration," 2025.
F. Wang, H. Cui, L. Yang, C. S. Lee, Z. Li and C. Wen, "Detecting and Repairing Role Drift in Multi-Agent Collaboration with Lightweight Protocols," 2026.
C. Shao, Y. Zi, Y. Deng, H. Liu, C. Zhang and Y. Ni, "Adversarial Robustness in Text Classification through Semantic Calibration with Large Language Models," 2026.
H. Zhang, L. Zhu, C. Peng, J. Zheng, J. Lin and R. Bao, "Intelligent Recommendation Systems Using Multi-Scale LoRA Fine-Tuning and Large Language Models," 2025.
F. Wang, Y. Ma, T. Guan, Y. Wang and J. Chen, "Autonomous Learning Through Self-Driven Exploration and Knowledge Structuring for Open-World Intelligent Agents," 2026.
P. Gomber, J. A. Koch and M. Siering, "Digital Finance and FinTech: Current Research and Future Research Directions," Journal of Business Economics, vol. 87, no. 5, pp. 537-580, 2017.
I. Lee and Y. J. Shin, "Fintech: Ecosystem, Business Models, Investment Decisions, and Challenges," Business Horizons, vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 35-46, 2020.
J. Frost, L. Gambacorta, Y. Huang, H. S. Shin and P. Zbinden, "BigTech and the Changing Structure of Financial Intermediation," Economic Policy, vol. 34, no. 100, pp. 761-799, 2019.
A. Goldfarb and C. Tucker, "Digital Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 3-43, 2019.
P. K. Ozili, "Impact of Digital Finance on Financial Inclusion and Stability," Borsa Istanbul Review, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 329-340, 2020.
B. H. Hall and J. Lerner, "The Financing of R&D and Innovation," Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, vol. 1, pp. 609-639, 2010.
J. R. Brown, S. M. Fazzari and B. C. Petersen, "Financing Innovation and Growth: Cash Flow, External Equity, and the 1990s R&D Boom," Journal of Finance, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 151-185, 2009.
A. N. Berger and G. F. Udell, "The economics of small business finance: The roles of private equity and debt markets in the financial growth cycle," Journal of Banking & Finance, vol. 22, no. 6-8, pp. 613-673, 1998.
F. Gu, J. Gao, X. Zhu and J. Ye, "The impact of digital inclusive finance on SMEs' technological innovation activities-Empirical analysis based on the data of new third board enterprises," PLOS ONE, vol. 18, no. 11, e0293500, 2025.
U. Gretzel, M. Sigala, Z. Xiang and C. Koo, "Smart tourism: Foundations and developments," Electronic Markets, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 179-188, 2015.
S. Raisch and J. Birkinshaw, "Organizational ambidexterity: Antecedents, outcomes, and moderators," Journal of Management, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 375-409, 2008.
R. G. King and R. Levine, "Finance and growth: Schumpeter might be right," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 108, no. 3, pp. 717-737, 1993.
T. Beck and A. Demirguc-Kunt, "Small and medium-size enterprises: Access to finance as a growth constraint," Journal of Banking & Finance, vol. 30, no. 11, pp. 2931-2943, 2006.
M. L. Tushman and C. A. O'Reilly III, "Ambidextrous organizations: Managing evolutionary and revolutionary change," California Management Review, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 8-29, 1996.
Y. Li, X. Liu and Q. Zhao, "Digital finance, absorptive capacity and enterprise dual innovation: An empirical analysis on mediation and threshold effects," Asian Journal of Technology Innovation, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 447-478, 2025.
L. Zhang, J. Chen, Z. Liu and Z. Hao, "Digital inclusive finance, financing constraints, and technological innovation of SMEs-Differences in the effects of financial regulation and government subsidies," Sustainability, vol. 15, no. 9, Art. no. 7144, 2025.
K. J. Preacher and A. F. Hayes, "Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models," Behavior Research Methods, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 879-891, 2008.
K. S. Bardos, M. Ertugrul and L. S. Gao, "Corporate social responsibility, product market perception, and firm value," Journal of Corporate Finance, vol. 62, Art. no. 101588, 2020.
R. M. Baron and D. A. Kenny, "The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 51, no. 6, p. 1173, 1986.
R. Levine, "Financial development and economic growth: Views and agenda," Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 688-726, 1997.
S. A. Waddock and S. B. Graves, "The corporate social performance-financial performance link," Strategic Management Journal, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 303-319, 1997.