东北财经大学学报

中国各级地方政府在地区经济发展中扮演着重要角色，其作为监管者和协调者对企业等经济主体的发展影响深远。本文基于2001—2019年中国沪深A股上市公司的数据，通过企业注册地址来匹配政府驻地迁移的地理信息，利用三重差分模型实证检验了政府地理邻近对企业年报可读性的影响及作用机制。研究发现：政府地理邻近能够提高企业年报可读性；政府地理邻近通过强化政府监管效应、强化企业对政府的政策响应提高企业年报可读性；政府地理邻近对企业年报可读性的提高作用发生在国有企业、近距离企业、与所在地市级政府驻地地理距离变近的企业、东部地区企业中。本文研究为中国政商关系分析提供了一个新的视角，并对中国“亲清有为”的政商关系优化具有实践意义。

Local governments at all levels in China play a vital role in regional economic development, with their functions as regulators and coordinators exerting profound influence on enterprises and other economic entities. Government seat relocation, as a significant spatial policy practice, provides a rare research setting for examining how changes in the geographic distance between the government and firms affect corporate information disclosure behavior. From the perspective of government geographic proximity, this study aims to reveal its causal effect on the readability of listed firms' annual reports and its underlying mechanisms. The findings offer empirical evidence for building a “cordial, clean, and impactful” government-business relationship and provide insights for optimizing spatial governance and improving the quality of information disclosure in capital markets.Using the quasi-natural experiment of prefecture-level city government seat relocations in China from 2001 to 2019, this study manually collected relocation information, including cities, timing, and addresses, and combined it with listed firms' registration addresses. The study empirically examines the impact of government geographic proximity on the readability of corporate annual reports and its underlying mechanisms. The findings are as follows. First, government geographic proximity significantly improves annual report readability. Second, mechanism tests indicate this effect operates mainly through two channels: strengthening government supervision and enhancing firms' policy responsiveness. Proximity reduces regulatory costs and information asymmetry while encouraging firms to respond more actively to information disclosure policies. Third, heterogeneity analysis shows the effect is more pronounced among state-owned enterprises, diminishes with distance, is stronger for municipal(vs. provincial) relocations, and is concentrated in eastern China.The marginal contribution of this study has two aspects. First, it constructs a “city, year, and distance” triple difference framework and employs advanced text analysis to measure readability, offering a referential identification strategy and measurement approach for related research. Second, from a geographic proximity perspective, it leverages exogenous government seat relocation policies to identify the causal effect of government-business spatial distance on information disclosure quality, providing new geospatial evidence for empirical research on the “cordial, clean, and impactful” government-business relationship in China's context.This study provides new evidence from a geospatial perspective for understanding China's “cordial, clean, and impactful” government-business relationship and extends interdisciplinary research on political geography and corporate governance. It supports local governments in optimizing spatial layouts to reduce regulatory costs and enhance oversight efficiency, strengthens the exemplary role of state-owned enterprises in information disclosure, and improves policy communication and compliance guidance for small and medium-sized enterprises through geographic proximity.