Earnings Management, Credit Resource Misallocation, and Economic Resilience: Transmission from Corporate Financial Behavior to Macroeconomic Outcomes

How micro-level corporate financial behavior affects economic resilience through financial resource allocation has become an important issue for understanding high-quality development and risk prevention. Based on data from Chinese A-share listed firms and provincial-level economic data from 2001 to 2024, this paper examines the impact of earnings management on credit resource misallocation and further analyzes its underlying mechanisms and macroeconomic consequences. The results show that earnings management exacerbates corporate credit resource misallocation. Earnings management affects credit allocation efficiency mainly by reducing information disclosure quality, increasing analyst forecast dispersion, distorting debt maturity structure, and aggravating agency problems. This effect is more pronounced among non-state-owned enterprises, firms with weaker internal controls, firms with higher fixed-asset intensity, and high-tech firms. Further analysis shows that earnings management weakens regional economic resilience through credit resource misallocation. This paper incorporates firm-level accounting information distortion, credit resource misallocation within the financial system, and macro-level economic resilience into a unified analytical framework. It reveals an important transmission mechanism through which micro-level financial behavior affects macroeconomic stability and provides empirical evidence for improving corporate information disclosure quality, optimizing credit resource allocation, and enhancing economic resilience.