Does digital tax enforcement drive corporate digitalization? Evidence from the Golden Tax Project III in China: A pre-registered report

Abstract

This pre-registered study tries to explore the interaction between the tax enforcement and corporate behavior based on a digital perspective. We are going to investigate three questions in this study: 1) whether the tax enforcement digitalization will drive firms to improve their digitalization? 2) if it does, what is the underlying mechanism? 3) what is the impact of the policy-driven digitalization on firms' productivity? To explore these questions and mitigate the endogenous problems, we utilize the “Golden Tax Project III” in China as the quasi-natural experiment to conduct a difference-in-difference (DID) analysis. This study expands the research on the economic consequences of tax enforcement and provides a new perspective for promoting high-quality economic development through the synchronized progress of digital government and digital economy.