Digital finance and corporate financial fraud

Abstract

Corporate financial fraud harms the interests of investors and affects the healthy development of the capital market. Understanding corporate financial fraud has important academic value and practical significance. Digital finance been rapidly developing over the past few years and scholars are investigating strategies for using digital finance as a tool to curb corporate financial fraud. This paper empirically examines the direct effect, intrinsic mechanism, and heterogeneous effect of digital finance on corporate financial fraud based on panel data of A-share listed corporations in China from 2011 to 2020. Results show that digital finance significantly inhibits corporate financial fraud. The breadth of coverage and depth of usage within digital finance show inhibitory effects on corporate financial fraud. This suggests that a combination of coverage and depth is needed to improve the success of digital finance on corporate financial fraud. The internal mechanisms suggest that digital finance inhibits corporate financial fraud by alleviating financing constraints, reducing corporate leverage, and decreasing agency costs. The heterogeneity analysis shows digital finance has a greater inhibitory effect for large-scale corporates, state-owned corporates, and corporates in areas with low degree of marketization. Our findings can provide reference for financial institutions, investors, analysts, and regulators to improve the quality of decision-making.