Public Data Openness and Sustainable Outward Investment: Evidence from Chinese Listed Firms

This study contributes to the literature on sustainable international investment by examining how public data openness—treated as a non-rivalrous production factor—enables firms to overcome information asymmetries, reduce financing constraints, and catalyze innovation-driven overseas expansion. Grounded in China’s dual strategic imperatives of digital factor marketization and high-quality outbound investment, we exploit the staggered rollout of municipal public data platforms (2008–2023) as a quasi-natural experiment and apply a firm- and city-level staggered difference-in-differences (DID) design to a sample of A-share listed firms. Our findings demonstrate that public data openness significantly enhances the sustainability of outward investment, measured through improved capital allocation efficiency and long-term resilience. Mechanism tests reveal that innovation capacity and eased financing constraints serve as key transmission channels, with stronger effects observed in firms with higher human capital endowments, robust internal controls, and exposure to technologically dynamic sectors. Heterogeneity analyses further indicate that the sustainability impact is amplified under environmental uncertainty, suggesting that data openness acts as an institutional buffer. The results offer actionable policy implications for aligning digital governance with corporate sustainability goals, and provide empirical grounding for integrating open data infrastructure into national strategies for responsible internationalization.