Abstract This study incorporates the dynamic incentive contract mechanism of managerial compensation into the three-period dynamic investment and financing decision model of enterprises, introduces the reputation penalty mechanism of social trust, and conducts an empirical analysis of the relationship and influence mechanism between social trust and corporate shadow banking using data from non-financial listed companies from 2015～2019. The results show that: (i) The higher the degree of regional social trust, the weaker the willingness of firms to engage in shadow banking. (ii) The above effect is more significant in companies with poorer corporate governance, higher information opacity, higher equity concentration and poorer growth. (iii) An increase in the level of social trust can act on firms’ shadow banking behavior by inhibiting management’s opportunistic behavior, exacerbating the risk cross-contagion effect and stabilizing the external investor sentiment channel.
