Corporate Financing Constraints and Accounting Transparency: Examining the Moderating Roles of Audit Outcomes and Ownership Structure

Abstract

: Using a sample of China’s A -share listed companies from 2018 to 2024, focuses on accounting information transparency as the core variable, deeply explores its direct impact on corporate financing constraints, and innovatively incorporates two key dimensions of audit opinions and ownership structure to systematically examine their moderating effects on the main relationship. A clean audit opinion strengthens the mitigating role of transparency, and the role of transparency in alleviating financing constraints is more obvious in privately held firms than in state-owned enterprises. The research conclusions remain robust after robustness and endogeneity tests. These findings pass a battery of sensitivity tests, and persist even after addressing potential endogeneity in the data using an instrumental variables approach. This work provides new empirical evidence of information asymmetry and signaling theories from the Chinese context, and extends findings and implications useful both for firms striving to improve financing practices, and regulators seeking to enhance disclosure frameworks.