Fiscal transparency is an important reason to influence economic development expectations, and also an important premise to guide enterprises to “move from virtual to real”. This paper selects the fiscal transparency score data of prefecture-level cities and takes the A-share listed companies from 2013 to 2019 as samples to test the impact, mechanism and consequences of fiscal transparency on corporate financialization.

The results show that: (1) Fiscal transparency can restrain corporate financialization. It can not only reduce the uncertainty of fiscal policy and restrain corporate financialization by stabilizing their performance expectations, but also alleviate the information asymmetry between government and enterprise and restrain corporate financialization by increasing cooperation between government and enterprise. (2) In terms of stabilizing expectations, when enterprises are faced with strong economic policy uncertainties, fierce industry competition and access to government subsidies, improving fiscal transparency is likely to stabilize their performance expectations, thus restraining financialization. (3) In terms of project decision-making, improving fiscal transparency is conducive to the participation of state-owned enterprises and enterprises with a high level of governance in project cooperation between government and enterprise, thus restraining financialization; and management overconfidence will weaken the impact of fiscal transparency on project decision-making. (4) Restraining corporate financialization through fiscal transparency can guide enterprises to return to main business and improve total factor productivity.

The policy suggestions are as follows: (1) Fiscal policies need to strengthen the guidance of enterprises from virtual to real. On the one hand, the government should enhance the transparency of fiscal work and stabilize enterprise expectations; on the other hand, the government should timely release project bidding information on its official website to encourage enterprises to participate in the cooperation between the government and private capital. (2) The government should properly carry out macro-control over the market and industries, provide special government subsidies to enterprises, and treat state-owned and non-state-owned enterprises equally. (3) Enterprises should pay attention to the internal governance mechanism to prevent the overconfident behavior tendency of senior managers. (4) Enterprises should combine policy guidance, actively grasp the opportunities of government-enterprise cooperation projects, and focus on the development of main business, so as to promote high-quality development and “move from virtual to real”.