Technology for Good - A Study of the Impact of Digital Economy Firms' Participation in the Common Wealth Model on Firm Performance

Under the new generation of technological and industrial revolutions, digital economy enterprises are increasingly becoming major contributors to socio-economic development. Their scale effect and marginal cost effect are different from traditional enterprises, which also raises concern and discussion on whether digital economy enterprises can promote more equitable and sustainable development of society. The participation of digital economy enterprises in the common wealth is an important source of legitimacy for their development. This thesis investigates the mechanism of the impact of their common wealth inputs on corporate financial performance by using a sample of digital economy firms among Chinese listed companies as a case study. It is found that, overall, the mechanism of the effect of firms' common affluence model on their financial performance has a positive effect. The main source of this positive effect is the secondary distribution of the firm, i.e., the legitimacy of tax contributions. Other legitimacy such as employee and shareholder legitimacy are not significantly associated with financial performance, while social philanthropic input from tertiary distribution participation has a significant negative effect. In the association of redistribution on firm performance, there is a positive facilitating effect on firms' R&D efficiency and a negative moderating effect of economic policy uncertainty. It suggests that there are differences in the impact of firms' legitimacy initiatives, such as tax contributions, on performance under different firm development expectations. Whereas in the third distribution, firms' R&D efficiency has a crowding-out effect on the economic gains from the legitimacy of common wealth participation, economic policy uncertainty has a reinforcing effect in the third distribution of firms. The above suggests that the development of digital economy firms is more positively facilitated by official legitimacy and currently lacks the constraints of industrial ecology from internal and public scrutiny.