Economic Policy Uncertainty and Business Performance : The Moderating Role of Service Transformation

This paper selects Chinese A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2011 to 2020 as a research sample and analyzes the impact of economic policy uncertainty on business performance. We find that economic policy uncertainty is detrimental to the improvement of business performance;service transformation can significantly offset the adverse effect of economic policy uncertainty on business performance, and this positive effect will increase with the depth of service transformation, Furthermore, embedded service transformation is more effective than mixed service transformation in weaking the adverse effects of economic policy uncertainty on business performance. The results of the heterogeneity test show that the negative relationship between economic policy uncertainty and firm business performance, as well as the positive effect of servitization transformation, is more noticeable in non-state-owned enterprises and low sale growth firms. The results are robust after various specifications of variables, possible endogeneity issues, and more control variables are considered