Summary:
Standards are an important aspect of the country's basic system, and standard guidance is an important symbol for an economy to enter high-quality development and participate in high-quality competition. Fully exploring the economic efficacy of standardization efforts to clarify the underlying mechanism through which standardization promotes high-quality development has become an important issue. It has been confirmed that standardization exerts a profound impact on the vitality and efficiency of commodity markets and factor markets. However, no research has systematically examined the influence of standardization on capital market efficiency. To fill this gap, this study investigates the impact of enterprise standardization on stock liquidity. This study analyzes the effect of enterprise standardization on stock liquidity through two channels: market competitiveness and information asymmetry. First, standardization facilitates product quality control, promotes innovation, drives enterprises toward lean management, and enhances labor productivity. These improvements strengthen corporate market competitiveness, thereby improving stock liquidity. Second, as an effective supplement to enterprises' explicit information, the disclosure of standard-related information enables investors to gain a better understanding of enterprises' production process, technical applications, workflow characteristics, and other aspects, which effectively expands the information set available for investors' decision-making, alleviating information asymmetry and improving stock liquidity. We manually collect the standardization information of listed companies. We find that a one-standard-deviation increase in the level of enterprise standardization leads to an average 4.42% increase in corporate stock liquidity, indicating that standardization has a significant positive effect on stock liquidity. The underlying mechanism lies in enhancing corporate market competitiveness and alleviating corporate information asymmetry. Cross-sectional analyses show that the impact of enterprise standardization on stock liquidity is more pronounced in regions with higher judicial quality because high-quality judicial systems ensure the effective enforcement of standards, thereby allowing standardization to better fulfill its role. Moreover, compared with standardization at the national, local, and industry levels, standardization at the enterprise and group levels has a more significant effect on stock liquidity. Compared with work standardization, technical standardization, and management standardization have a more significant effect on stock liquidity. Finally, the analysis of economic consequences shows that enterprise standardization can significantly reduce enterprise default risk by improving stock liquidity. This study makes three possible contributions.First, further stimulate the vitality of market entities in standardization. Continue to promote the market-oriented transformation of the standard supply mechanism, enhance the participation and voice of market entities in standard-setting, and improve the adaptability and scientificity of the standard system. Second, promote the coordinated development of standardization and scientific and technological innovation. Further explore the linkage mechanism between scientific and technological innovation and standardization work, such as incorporating standard-setting into the outcome requirements of scientific and technological innovation projects, and focusing on providing standards in key technology fields. Third, improve the level of openness and sharing of standard information. Enterprises should enhance the openness of standardization and realize interconnection and sharing of standard information in a wider scope. Fourth, strengthen standard implementation and judicial protection. Incorporate enterprises’ standard implementation status into the social credit system, and strengthen the in-process and post-implementation supervision of standard enforcement. Through a combination of incentives and constraints, the actual implementation effect of standards could be improved. Finally, enhance the applicability of enterprise standards and association standards. When formulating internal standards, enterprises should align with their own development stage and business characteristics, focus on the coordination between the standard system, corporate strategy and organizational culture, avoid being divorced from reality and becoming a mere formality, and effectively let standards play a role in improving operational quality and efficiency.
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