Abstract
In the context of the digital economy, exploring the impact of digital transformation on the cost of debt financing has great practical significance for alleviating the “expensive financing” problem faced by Chinese enterprises. Enterprise digital transformation builds an efficient supply chain network, which promotes customer-enterprise exchanges and reduces transaction costs across various links in the enterprise. Using the data of China’s A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2021, this paper adopts the panel regression model with fixed effects and through the robustness test of two-stage least squares (2SLS), propensity score matching (PSM), replacing explained variables and adding control variables, this paper examines the impact of corporate digital transformation on debt financing cost and its mechanism. The results show that going digital can help businesses significantly lower their debt financing costs by dispersing customer concentration. Finally, the moderating effect suggests that institutional investor shareholding can directly and indirectly affect how digital transformation affects debt financing costs. The impact mechanism revolves around the relationship between customer concentration and debt financing costs. The findings help open the “black box” of how enterprise digital transformation affects debt financing costs, expand the literature on enterprise digital transformation, and offer a new path to reduce enterprise debt financing costs.
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Xuan; He, Jingjing; and Wang, Yaping, "How Digital Transformation Reduces Corporate Debt Financing Costs: The Roles of Customer Concentration and Institutional Investors in China’s A-Share Market" (2026). ICEB 2026 Proceedings (Beijing, China). 46.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/iceb2026/46