The Marketization of Data Elements Drives the Improvement of Enterprise Labor Productivity

Against the backdrop of the in-depth development of the digital economy, the market-oriented allocation of data, as a new production factor, has become the main driving force for changing the production mode of enterprises and improving the efficiency of resource allocation. Based on the Melitz-Ottaviano model of heterogeneous-firm monopolistic competition, this paper adds the influencing factors of data element marketization policies, establishes a heterogeneous and differentiated firm model that incorporates marketization policies for data elements, derives the internal mechanism by which the data element marketization affects corporate labor productivity, and selects Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2023 as the research objects. The establishment of data trading platforms in various prefecture-level cities is taken as a quasi-natural experiment, and a multi-period difference-in-differences empirical test is used to examine the causal effect of data element marketization on enterprise labor productivity. The research finds that data element marketization significantly improves enterprise labor productivity, and the conclusion remains valid after multiple robustness tests. The mechanism test shows that data element marketization mainly enables the improvement in enterprise labor productivity through three transmission paths: enhancing technological innovation efficiency, improving product supply-demand matching, and optimizing investment allocation efficiency. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the policy effect exhibits significant structural differentiation. From the enterprise perspective, the policy has a more prominent enhancing effect on non-state-owned enterprises and large-scale enterprises. From the industry perspective, the policy effect is significantly stronger in technology-intensive and labor-intensive industries than in capital-intensive industries. From the regional perspective, the policy effect is more pronounced in the eastern region and enterprises on the southeast side of the Hu Huanyong Line. From the factor absorption perspective, enterprises with high digitalization foundation and high reliance on research and development experience greater policy benefits.