Abstract: Under the background of “double carbon”, it is of great importance to balance economic development and environmental protection. The development level of environmental service enterprises, as market players of environmental governance and ecological protection, has a direct impact on regional environmental quality. It is very important to reveal the development law of environmental service enterprises for China to promote green development strategy and realize the goal of “double carbon”. Digital transformation is the key to improving service quality and competitiveness of environmental service enterprises. But in the process of practice, enterprises generally face the problems with “not wanting transformation”, “fearing transformation” and “being unable to transform”. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to evaluate the economic effect of digital transformation scientifically and explore the mechanism of enterprise digital transformation. A review of the existing literature reveals that research on digitalization has focused on the macro level such as society and regions. Besides, there are relatively few studies from the microscopic perspective at the enterprise level. Only a few studies show that digital transformation can improve the innovation performance, production efficiency, and organizational authorization behavior of enterprises. Improving enterprise performance is the fundamental purpose of enterprise operation. However, the relationship between digitalization level and enterprise performance is still controversial and lacks the support of empirical evidence, and its internal influence mechanism is not clear. Based on this, this paper constructs a theoretical framework from three dimensions: direct impact mechanism, indirect impact mechanism and heterogeneous impact mechanism of digital transformation on enterprise performance, and attempts to clarify the law of the impact of digital transformation on enterprise performance. The possible contributions of this paper are as follows: First, limited by the fact that it is difficult to measure digitalization at the micro level, the existing literature mostly stays on theoretical analysis and case studies. In this paper, the text analysis technology is used to construct digital transformation indicators, and the panel data model is constructed to fill the existing gap in the empirical study of environmental service enterprises’ digital transformation. Second, based on the realistic background of the servitization transformation of environmental service enterprises, the patterns of the impact of digital transformation on enterprise performance under the scenario of environmental service model innovation are explored, which effectively enriches the situational research perspective of the relevant literature. Third, this paper empirically tests the economic effects of the digital transformation of environmental service enterprises, constructs a relatively systematic theoretical framework of “digital transformation—enterprise performance”, which is conducive to opening the mechanism “black box” between digital transformation and enterprise performance of environmental service enterprises, and providestheoretical guidance for the digital transformation of environmental service enterprises.
   This paper takes Chinese listed environmental service enterprises from 2010 to 2019 as research samples, uses the text analysis technology to construct digital transformation indicators, empirically tests the economic effects of digital transformation on environmental service enterprises, explores the indirect transmission mechanism of digital transformation on enterprise performance, and further analyzes the heterogeneous effects under different enterprise characteristic scenarios. The study has found that: (1)From the direct effect, digital transformation has a significant positive impact on the economic performance of environmental service enterprises, and the driving effect lasts for a long time. (2)The indirect transmission mechanism test shows that operating efficiency directly affects enterprise performance, while digital transformation can indirectly improve enterprise performance by improving operating efficiency of environmental service enterprises. (3)From the perspective of heterogeneity of service model, the economic effect of digital transformation is significant for enterprises implementing new service model, while for enterprises still using traditional service model, the impact of digital transformation on enterprise performance is not significant. Therefore, the service model has a heterogeneous effect on the economic effect of digital transformation. (4)From the perspective of enterprise ownership, digital transformation has a significant promoting effect on the performance of non-state-owned enterprises, while the impact of digital transformation on the performance of state-owned enterprises is not significant. Therefore, the enterprise ownership has a heterogeneous effect on the economic effect of digital transformation. This paper contributes to clarifying the impact effect and mechanism of digital transformation on enterprise performance, and also provides useful insights to drive digital transformation in environmental service enterprises.

Key words: digitalization, enterprise performance, text analysis, environmental service enterprises

摘要： “双碳”背景下,环境服务业作为保障我国绿色发展的重要力量,势必将在实现“3060”目标的过程中起到关键作用。近年来,数字环保、智慧环保等新理念的兴起,为环境服务企业的转型发展提供了新思路。本研究选取2010—2019年我国237家环境服务上市企业数据,采用文本分析法构建关键指标,从直接传导机制、间接传导机制和异质性传导机制三个角度探索了数字化转型价值创造的内在机理。研究发现:(1)数字化转型对环境服务企业的绩效水平具有积极影响,且该影响的持续性较长;(2)数字化转型可通过改善企业经营效率间接提高企业绩效表现;(3)异质性分析还发现,数字化转型对企业绩效的推动效应受服务模式和企业所有制等微观特征因素的影响,非国有企业和实施新型服务模式的企业其数字化转型的经济效果比国有企业和传统环境服务提供商更显著。

关键词: 数字化转型, 企业绩效, 文本分析, 环境服务企业