China’s emergence as an AI superpower has grown significantly since 2023 with estimates indicating its AI market will exceed 10 billion USD during this time frame. This emergence raises an important question: whether AI-related corporate disclosure is associated with stronger financial reporting transparency among Chinese listed firms. To answer this, this study uses a balanced panel of 1, 028 companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2011 to 2023, to examine the relationship between AI-related disclosure intensity and financial transparency. Financial transparency is measured through a four-point external transparency rating, where higher values indicate stronger disclosure quality, while AI intensity is measured as the natural logarithm of AI-related keywords appearing in firms’ annual reports. Because the transparency rating is ordinal, fixed-effects ordered logit is used as the main estimator. Mundlak ordered logit and ordered probit models are further applied as ordinal robustness checks. The findings show that firms with stronger AI-related disclosure intensity are more likely to receive higher transparency ratings, and this association remains stable after controlling for firm characteristics, firm-level heterogeneity, year effects, alternative ordinal specifications, and alternative winsorization thresholds. Moderation tests using interaction terms show that the AI–transparency association is stronger for smaller firms and non-state-owned enterprises, while the moderating effects of high-tech industry status and regional development are not statistically supported.
Yulun Gu (Fri,) studied this question.