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Research Article

RETRACTED: Can core competence help reduce stock price synchronicity? - Empirical evidence based on text analysis

Retraction

The PLOS One Editors retract this article [1] because it was identified as one of a series of submissions for which we have concerns about potential manipulation of the publication process, peer review integrity, and authorship. These concerns call into question the validity and provenance of the reported results. We regret that the issues were not identified prior to the article’s publication.

All authors did not agree with the retraction.

9 Oct 2025: The PLOS One Editors (2025) Retraction: Can core competence help reduce stock price synchronicity? - Empirical evidence based on text analysis. PLOS ONE 20(10): e0333986. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0333986 View retraction

Abstract

This paper constructs the measurement index of core competence by text analysis method and empirically tests the impact of core competence on stock price synchronicity. We find that the stronger the core competence, the lower the stock price synchronicity, and mechanism test shows that core competence reduces the stock price synchronicity by enhancing the transparency of corporate information, which is still valid under a series of robustness tests. Further research shows that:(1) when the corporate governance environment is poor (higher level of internal earnings management, lower quality of accounting information, greater separation of ownership and control, lower shareholding ratio of external institutional investors, weaker product market competition, less media attention), the core competence has a more significant effect on the decline of stock price synchronization; (2)vertically, the dynamic improvement of core competence in the time dimension can play a role in stabilizing stock price synchronization; (3)after distinguishing the types of core competence, we find that the core competence related to information disclosure is more helpful to reduce the stock price synchronization; (4)after the CSRC forces listed companies to disclose the core competence information in the annual report, the core competence plays a stronger role in reducing the stock price synchronization. This study reveals the important role of core competence in reducing stock price synchronization. It not only enriches the relevant literature of core competence and stock price synchronization, but also has important practical significance for the government and regulatory departments to improve the efficiency of capital market allocation.

Citation: Sun C, Sun H, Li N, Khan MA, Zhang Z (2021) RETRACTED: Can core competence help reduce stock price synchronicity? - Empirical evidence based on text analysis. PLoS ONE 16(11): e0259409. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409

Editor: J E. Trinidad Segovia, University of Almeria, SPAIN

Received: July 7, 2021; Accepted: October 20, 2021; Published: November 9, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Sun et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are uploaded as Additional Information files (zip form).

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction

At present, human society has entered the era of digital economy, enhancing the core competence has become even important to the long-term healthy development of enterprises and the country [1, 2]. Improving the corporate core competence is not only a key measure to avoid China falling into the "middle-income trap" and achieve leapfrog development [3], but also an inevitable requirement to improve the allocation efficiency of capital market in China. In October 2020, the “Proposal about the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on Formulating the 14th Five-year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-term Goal of 2035” pointed out that "we should cultivate a number of leading enterprises with core competence". Besides, General Secretary Xi Jinping repeatedly stressed the need to accelerate the cultivation of more local enterprises with core competence. However, due to the lack of measurement methods for core competence, empirical research on the economic consequences of core competence is still rare. Meanwhile, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) issued the “Public Securities Companies’ Information Disclosure Content and Format Guidelines No. 2: The Content and Format of Annual Reports (Revised in 2012)” on September 21, 2012. It is stipulated that listed companies should disclose relevant information about their core competence during the reporting period in the annual report. This provides a good research scenario for conducting empirical research on the topic of corporate core competence. Therefore, the text analysis of the core competence information of the annual report through python is very valuable.

Stock price synchronicity is a key index to measure the allocation efficiency of capital market. It refers to the relationship between single stock price fluctuation and market average price fluctuation. Its economic significance is the amount of company specific information absorbed by stock price. Morck et al. [4] first used the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) decision coefficient (R²) to measure it. Inspired by this classic literature, the synchronization of stock price has gradually attracted the attention of scholars in the field of finance. It has been generally believed that China’s stock market presents an obvious phenomenon of price synchronization. The special information of listed companies is not well integrated into the stock trading, which greatly hinders the function of information transmission and resource allocation in the capital market [4–9]. Based on the above background, it is an important task to deeply analyzes the formation reasons and internal mechanism of stock price synchronization, and explores how to effectively reduce the stock price synchronization of China’s capital market on this basis. This has a distinct reference significance for improving the information transmission efficiency of the capital market and boosting China’s financial construction in the new era.

Based on the theory of information efficiency, many literatures show that the cause of stock price synchronization can be connected by the important logic of information transparency, that is, the higher the information transparency is, the more reference information investors can know. By taking targeted trading decisions, the company’s special information can be transferred into the long and short trading of individual stocks and reflected in the stock price, so as to restrain the " same rise and fall" of stock price. Around this logic, scholars at home and abroad have extensively discussed the influence of the ownership structure [10], institutional investors [11], analyst information transmission [8, 12, 13], media reports [7, 14], leverage structure [15] and other factors on the stock price synchronicity, enriching the research context of "influencing factors- information transparency- stock price synchronization". However, the existing literature tends to focus on a specific internal or external governance factor which affect information transparency. However, core competence, as the development pillar of a company built in long-term business practice, has a wide and direct impact on the company’s business decision-making, management system, performance, etc. Core competence may be the deep-seated factor that affects the information transparency of the company and the stock price synchronization. Theoretically, on the one hand, companies with strong core competence are more willing to convey more comprehensive and accurate positive information to the market, so as to distinguish them from other companies. So the stronger the core competence is, the stronger the motivation of companies to improve the quality of information disclosure. On the other hand, due to the value and scarcity of core competence, the information disclosed by the company will contain more valuable special information, and attract more investors’ attention and analysis, so as to promote the heterogeneous company information of stock price and reduce the synchronous change degree of stock price compared with the market. It is a pity that there are few studies on the relationship between core competence and stock price synchronization. In view of this, this paper attempts to explore the following questions: can core competence play a role in reducing stock price synchronization? If it can be reduced, what is its internal mechanism? Furthermore, what factors will affect this inhibition?

In order to answer the above questions, based on the annual report of China’s A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2017, this paper constructs the measurement index of enterprise’s core competence through text analysis, and empirically explores the impact of enterprise’s core competence on stock price synchronization. The results show that the core competence has a significant negative impact on the stock price synchronization, that is, the stronger the core competence is, the lower the stock price synchronization is. Mechanism test shows that the core competence of the enterprise improves the information transparency of the company, and then reduces the level of stock price synchronization. The above conclusion is still valid under a series of robustness tests. Further research shows that governance environment plays a significant moderating role in the negative correlation between core competence and stock price synchronicity. The lower the quality of internal and external governance environment is the more significant the effect of core competence on stock price synchronization is. The lower quality of internal governance environment is measured by the higher the level of internal earnings management, the lower the quality of accounting information, and the greater the degree of separation between the two rights. The lower quality of external governance environment is measured by the lower the shareholding ratio of external institutional investors, the weaker the product market competition, and the less media attention. In the adjacent period, with the improvement of core competence, the stock price synchronicity of the company gradually decreases. Compared with other types of core competence, the core competence related to information disclosure is more helpful to reduce the synchronization of stock price. Finally, after China Securities Regulatory Commission forces listed companies to disclose the core competence information in the annual report, the core competence of enterprises has a more significant effect on reducing the stock price synchronization.

The contribution of this paper is mainly reflected in the following three aspects. First, this study expands the relevant research on the economic consequences of core competence. The classical theory of management mainly qualitatively discusses the effect of core competence on the company’s competitive advantage and performance, and fails to carry out extensive research in the field of corporate finance and capital market. Especially, few studies focus on the impact of core competence on the pricing efficiency of capital market. Through empirical research, this paper finds that the core competence of enterprises can alleviate the synchronization of stock price, thus expanding the research on its economic consequences to the field of capital market. Second, this study enriches the existing research on the influencing factors of stock price synchronization. Previous literature focused on information transparency and studied the impact of different internal and external governance mechanisms on stock price synchronization, but there is no literature on whether core competence can reduce stock price synchronization. As the integration of resources and capabilities owned by companies, core competence has a wide and direct impact on the company’s information disclosure behavior, which may be the underlying cause affecting the information environment, and ultimately affect the stock price synchronization. This paper combines the theory of enterprise management with the research of capital market, and verifies that enhancing the core competence is the key way to alleviate the synchronization of stock price, which provides a new direction for future research. Third, this study clarifies the mechanism of core competence affecting stock price synchronization. Through the mechanism test, this paper shows that the core competence of the enterprise improves the information transparency of the company, and then reduces the level of stock price synchronization. It not only confirms the relationship between the core competence and stock price synchronization, but also clarifies the mechanism of the core competence affecting stock price synchronization.

The structure of this paper is as follows. The second part is the literature review and hypothesis. The third part is the data source and research design, including sample selection and data sources, variable definition, and model design. The fourth part reports the results of descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, univariate test, main test, mechanism test and robustness test. The fifth part is further research. The sixth part is the conclusion and enlightenment of this paper.

2. Theoretical analysis and research hypothesis

2.1. The economic consequences of core competence

Due to the difficulty in measuring the core competence, the research on the economic consequences of core competence is mainly based on theoretical analysis. The empirical research, especially the large sample empirical research, is relatively less. Previous studies have carried out a lot of discussions around the conceptual framework and nature characteristics of core competence, and confirmed that core competence has the characteristics of value, scarcity, irreplaceable, difficult to imitate, etc., which is the source of sustainable competitive advantage of enterprises [1, 16–22]. There are also some studies briefly discussed the economic consequences of core competence from a certain dimension, such as technology [23, 24], which shows that technological competitiveness can improve enterprise performance. With the help of text analysis method, Sun et al. [25] constructed the measurement index of core competence, confirmed that the core competence is helpful for the enterprise to deleverage, and provided a reference for the large sample empirical research on the topic of core competence.

2.2. Influencing factors of stock price synchronicity

The concept of stock price synchronization was first proposed by [26]. On the basis of Roll [26], Morck et al. [4] firstly proposed for using the decision coefficient R² obtained by the regression of individual stocks and market returns in CAPM to represent the synchronization of stock price. Subsequently, many scholars have carried out extensive research on stock price synchronization, and found that excessive stock price synchronization will produce a series of negative effects, such as reducing the efficiency of capital allocation [27, 28], impairing the effectiveness of corporate governance [29], etc. Therefore, which factors lead to the high synchronization of stock price has become the focus of academic circles.

From the macro level, based on the perspective of property rights protection, Morck et al. [4] found that the more robust the property rights protection, the lower the stock price synchronization. Compared with developed countries, the synchronization level of stock prices in emerging capital market countries is more serious. In line with the research of Morck et al. [4], Jin and Myers [9] pointed out the synchronization of stock price is affected by the information transparency of the country. The lower the information transparency, the more investors rely on the average market information to make investment decisions, resulting in more obvious consistency of price changes. You et al. [30] focused on China’s capital market and found that with the introduction and revision of various regulatory policies, the synchronization of stock prices gradually weakened. In a word, the explanations of stock price synchronicity in the classical literature have something in common, which are essentially based on the perspective of information transparency, and lay a sufficient foundation for many subsequent studies.

From the micro level, many scholars focus on the micro factors of stock price synchronization, with information transparency as the logical starting point. In terms of ownership structure, Wang et al. [10] found that companies with high degree of separation of ownership and control, state-owned nature and low degree of equity balance have worse information transparency, resulting in higher synchronization of stock price. Li [31] found that the largest shareholder has a classic benefit synergy and entrenchment defense effect on stock price synchronicity. And stock price synchronicity initially increases and then decreases with the increase of largest shareholder’s shareholding ratio. In terms of institutional investors, Hou and Ye [11] found that institutional investors can play a role in reducing stock price synchronicity. In terms of audit quality, Gul et al. [5] found that companies with four largest international auditors have significantly lower stock price synchronicity. In the aspect of securities analysts, there are some controversies in the past research. Chan and Hameed [32], Lu and Peng [33] pointed out that with the increase in the number of analysts covered, the synchronicity of stock prices tends to be higher. The research of Zhu et al. [12] and Xu et al. [13] shows that analysts’ attention is conducive to reducing stock price synchronicity. Yi et al. [8] measured heterogeneous information in analysts’ research reports based on text analysis, and found a significant negative correlation between analysts’ attention and stock price synchronicity. In terms of media supervision, literatures show that news media reports [7] and microblog information disclosure [14] can effectively inhibit the synchronicity of stock prices. In addition, scholars also expand the research on the influencing factors of stock price synchronization from the aspects of earnings quality [34, 35], accounting conservatism [36], characteristics of the board of directors [37], political connections [38], cross listing [39] and so on. And the conclusions support that information transparency is the core of stock price synchronization from the micro level.

2.3. Core competence, information transparency and stock price synchronicity

According to the existing research, whether the core competence of enterprises can affect the stock price synchronicity depends on whether it can affect the information transparency, so that more stock level characteristic information is absorbed by the capital market, and finally reflected in the stock valuation.

On the one hand, the value characteristic of core competence makes enterprises have stronger motivation to transmit more company information to the capital market. And this will improve the information environment between enterprises and investors from the perspective of information adequacy. According to the theory of cost-benefit analysis, enterprises with strong core competence have taken the lead in the market competition, compared with the potential benefits of positive compliance information disclosure, the opportunity cost of concealing company information, reducing the quality of information and earnings manipulation is obviously higher [40]. In addition, according to the signaling theory, enterprises with strong core competence should be more inclined to disclose comprehensive and accurate information related to the company’s operation [41]. This can enhance the understanding of stakeholders for their own strength and achieve the effect of shaping the corporate image and consolidating the competitive advantage finally.

On the other hand, the scarcity characteristic of core competence makes the information transmitted by companies to the outside world naturally contain more company specific information and attract more investors’ attention. Thus, the degree of information asymmetry between companies and investors has been alleviated from the perspective of information characteristics. The scarcity of core competence is reflected in that it must be owned by individual enterprises. When enterprises with weak core competence disclose information, the content they disclose is often in line with the general practice of industry development, it is difficult to reflect more distinctive and rich heterogeneous information. The probability of attracting market attention is also lower. In contrast, when enterprises with strong core competence disclose information, the content disclosed will be more related to the company’s competitive advantage and development prospects, with more heterogeneous information of individual stock dimension, thus forming a sharp contrast with other enterprises in the industry. Enterprises with stronger core competence are more likely to get investors’ attention [42], which improves the information content of the stock price [43, 44], and finally reduce the synchronicity of stock price.

Combining the above two mechanisms, the stronger the core competence of the enterprise, the more likely the enterprise is to enhance the sufficiency and characteristics of information transmission. So that the company’s special information can be better reflected in the stock price, inhibiting the synchronization of stock price.

Based on the above analysis, the research hypothesis of this paper is put forward.

  1. H1: There is a significant negative correlation between core competence and stock price synchronization. The stronger the core competence is, the lower the stock price synchronization is.

3. Data and research design

3.1. Sample selection and data sources

This paper chooses China’s A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2017 as samples. The data of core competence was collected by manual sorting and text analysis, and the financial indicators and stock market data of this paper come from CSMAR database and RESSET database. Furthermore, referring to the common practice of similar studies, this paper selects the original samples as follows: ① the sample of listed companies in financial industry are excluded; ② the samples of listed companies treated by ST and * ST are excluded; ③ the samples of listed companies with missing, abnormal and extreme conditions are excluded. After the above screening and sorting process, 10136 "company-year" observations are finally obtained. In addition, in order to prevent extreme observations from interfering with the accuracy of the empirical results, this paper adopts winsorize processing at 1% and 99% levels for continuous variables.

3.2. Variable definition

3.2.1. Corporate core competence.

Referring to Sun et al. [25], the data of core competence comes from the annual reports of Chinese listed companies, which are obtained through text analysis and manual collection. There are two formats to describe the corporate core competence in the specified paragraphs of the annual report. One is reported in “separate paragraphs with corresponding sub-headings,” which means that the corporate has summarized the kind of core competence and artificial judging is not required any more. The other one is reported in “one section without sub-heading,” which means that the corporate has not summarized the kind of core competence and artificial judging is required to distinguish between different kinds of core competence. In summary, our paper uses different methods adopted for these two formats to extract the core competence in the annual report of listed companies. The specific process is as follows:

  1. Download the annual reports of all Chinese listed companies during 2007 to 2017 from CNINFO through Python.
  2. Manually sort out the starting words and ending words of the paragraphs referring to core competence in all annual reports.
  3. Intercept the contents of the paragraph referring to core competence through Python according to starting words and ending words.
  4. Sort out the annual reports that refer to specific core competence in “separate paragraphs with sub-headings” through Python, and draw out the types of core competence of these companies.
  5. Use Python to calculate the kinds and corresponding frequency for each kind of core competence in the annual reports of “separate paragraphs with sub-headings,” with manual sorting as assistance. Combined with the opinions of 10 experts and professors from the field of finance or management, 94 words with frequency of 15 times or more are selected as the core competence’s categories which have been recognized by the listed companies.
  6. These 94 words are summarized into 30 kinds of core competence through manual analysis of the 10 experts and professors.
  7. Four people respectively sort out the dictionaries corresponding to each kind of core competence by intensively reading the annual reports of “separate paragraphs with sub-headings,” and then summarize and extract the dictionaries summarized by four people to form the precise dictionaries corresponding to each kind of core competence.
  8. According to the dictionary, sort out the kind of core competence from the annual reports of “one section without sub-heading” through Python, so as to obtain the core competence’s kinds of all listed companies.
  9. Extract the annual report of “one section without subheading” randomly, and summarize core competence’s kind manually. Compare the result of manual interpretation with the result got from step 8 and the consistency between the two results proves the effectiveness of this method.

Specifically, this paper measures the strength of corporate core competences with their kind and intensity calculated by Python according to the dictionaries of each kind of core competence. For example, if the text analysis result of Python shows that the corporate i has two kinds of core competence: brand and technology. In the paragraphs of core competence, there are 3 dictionaries reflecting the core competence of brand and 2 dictionaries reflecting the core competence of technology; then, the corporate i’s core competence kind is 2, and the corporate i’s core competence intensity is 5. In order to make results easier to analyze, for each corporate, we use ln(core competence intensity + 1) to measure its strength of core competence. To ensure the effectiveness of the measurement, we also use ln(core competence kind + 1), core competence intensity, and core competence kind as alternative measurement index in the robustness tests and the empirical results are consistent.

3.2.2. Stock price synchronicity.

Based on Gul et al. [5], Li et al. [45], Yi et al. [8] and Wang and Li [46], this paper calculates the stock price synchronicity variable by the following methods.

Firstly, according to the model (1), the listed companies in the sample are regressed as follows to get the corresponding goodness of fit . (1)

Among them, Reti,t represents the stock return rate of the company i on day t, MarketRett and IndustryRett represents the rate of return of the A-share market and the industry of company i (excluding company i) on day t respectively. The market and industry rate of return are calculated by weighted average according to the market value standard, and the industry classification is based on the classification standard of CSRC in 2012. In addition, referring to the measures taken by similar studies to reduce the impact of potential trading bias, this paper includes the market and industry returns that lag for one period into the model. In the robustness test, this paper will also remove the lag rate of return data to refit the stock price synchronicity index.

Then, on the basis of the calculated in model (1), getting the stock price synchronicity index Synchi,t of company i in year t according to model(2).

(2)

3.2.3. Control variables.

In order to avoid the influence of other factors on the results of this paper, referring to the existing research, this paper selects the control variables of financial status, market performance and corporate governance that may affect the synchronization of stock price. The control variables include corporate scale (Size), financial leverage(Lev), return on total assets (Roa), market value (Marketvalue), stock volume (Volumn), stock return (Ret), turnover rate (Turnonver), proportion of state owned shares (Govhold), the Big Four Auditors (Big4), time to market (Age), issuing B-shares (Bshares), H-share listing (Cross), number of companies in the same industry (Indnum), scale of companies in the same industry (Indsize) and market value of companies in the same industry (Indvalue), etc. The specific variable definitions are shown in Table 1.

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Table 1. Variable definitions.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t001

3.3. Model design

In order to empirically test whether the core competence of enterprises can reduce the synchronization of stock price, based on the research of samples and variables, this paper establishes a multiple linear regression model (3): (3) In model (3), this paper focuses on the coefficient of core competence and evaluates its impact on stock price synchronization. According to the hypothesis, this paper expects that core and synch will show a negative correlation in the statistical sense, so as to verify that the stronger the core competence of enterprises, the lower the stock price synchronicity.

4. Empirical results

4.1. Descriptive statistics

The descriptive statistical results are shown in S1 Appendix. The average value of Synch is -0.242, which is consistent with the domestic literature in this field [47–50]. Compared with the United States, the data shows that China’s stock price shows a higher synchronicity. The minimum value of Core is 0.693, the maximum value is 4.094, and the standard deviation is 0.667. The value range before logarithm processing (i.e. the "core competence category degree" defined in the previous paper) is 1–59, which indicates that there are great differences in the core competence of different enterprises. At the same time, it has sufficient heterogeneity, which can be used in quantitative research. There is no significant difference between the other variables and the existing literature. The above results show that the calculation of variables in this paper is accurate, which provides a reliable basis for further empirical research.

4.2. Correlation analysis

S2 Appendix reports the Pearson correlation coefficient of empirical variables in this paper. The results of correlation analysis show that there is a significant negative correlation between synchronicity and core competence at the level of 1%, which preliminarily supports the hypothesis of this paper, that is, the stronger the core competence is, the lower the synchronicity is.

4.3. Univariate test

Table 2 reports the results of univariate test. Among them: the results of mean test show that the mean value of stock price synchronization of the group with strong core competence is -0.296, and that of the group with weak core competence is -0.202. According to the results of independent sample t test, the mean value difference between the two groups is significant at the level of 1%. The results of median test show that the median of stock price synchrony of samples with strong core competence is -0.274, and that of samples with weak core competence is -0.166. According to Wilcoxon rank sum test, the median difference between the two groups is significant at the level of 1%. The above results show that the stock price synchronization level of the companies with strong core competence is significantly low, which preliminarily supports the research hypothesis of this paper.

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Table 2. Univariate test.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t002

4.4. Main regression results

The regression results of model (3) are shown in Table 3. Among them, column (1) only carries on the preliminary regression to the explained variable and the explanatory variable, column (2) adds the control variable on the basis of column (1), and column (3) controls the annual effect and industry effect on the basis of the front variables. Finally, in order to avoid the influence of potential heteroscedasticity and sequence correlation problems on the regression results, column (4) carries out cluster processing at the company level on the basis of column (3). According to Table 3, the coefficients of core competence of enterprises in columns (1) to (4) are -0.039, - 0.091, - 0.037 and -0.037 respectively, which are significant at the 1% confidence level, indicating that the core competence of enterprises is significantly negatively correlated with the stock price synchronization, that is, the stronger the core competence of enterprises is, the lower the stock price synchronicity of listed companies is, It further supports the research hypothesis of this paper.

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Table 3. Main regression results: Core competence and stock price synchronicity.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t003

4.5. Mechanism test

As mentioned in the previous theoretical derivation, information transparency is the mechanism that leads to the significant effect of core competence on stock price synchronicity. On this basis, this paper further analyzes the internal mechanism of the impact of enterprise core competence on stock price synchronicity, that is, whether the enterprise core competence affects stock price synchronicity by improving the company’s information transparency.

In order to verify the existence of the above mechanism, the following recursive models are designed based on the mediating effect test method introduced by Wen et al. [51], which is widely used in management research. (3) (4) (5) In the above models, the purpose of model (3) is to test the effect of enterprise core competence on stock price synchronicity, model (4) is to explore the impact of enterprise core competence on the information transparency of the company, and model (5) is to further test whether the enterprise core competence has a significant impact on stock price synchronicity under the control of information transparency. According to the principle of mediating effect test: first, we regress the model (3) to test whether the core competence of enterprises can significantly reduce the stock price synchronicity, which has been verified in the previous regression analysis. The second step is to implement the multiple linear regression of model (4) to test the relationship between the intermediary variable information transparency and the enterprise core competence. If the core coefficient is significantly positive, it proves that the enterprise core competence plays a role in improving the company’s information transparency. The third step is to regress the model (5). If the coefficient β2 is significantly negative and the coefficient β1 becomes larger (the absolute value becomes smaller), it shows that information transparency plays a mediating role in the negative impact of core competence on stock price synchronicity, that is, core competence suppresses stock price synchronicity by improving information transparency.

In the model (4), based on the research of Anderson et al. [52], Xin et al. [53] and Li et al. [54], this paper uses the number of analysts tracking and prediction accuracy of analysts to construct the proxy variable of information transparency. By virtue of their information acquisition advantages and professional analysis ability [7], analysts can transfer company specific information to the market, which can reduce the degree of information asymmetry between the covered target and the outside world [8, 12, 13]. The number of analysts tracking measures the degree of the company’s attention from the outside world, and can be used as a proxy variable of information transparency. The deviation between analysts’ earnings forecasts and the company’s actual performance is restricted by the company’s information environment [55–58], which can reflect the information transparency of the company [59, 60].

Based on this, this paper constructs the proxy variable Infor of company information transparency, which is calculated as following model (6): (6) Among them, Coverage is the focus of analysts. According to the common practice, the calculation method is as following model (7): (7) Accuracy is the accuracy of analysts’ earnings forecast, which is based on the research of Wang and Wang [61], the calculation method is as following model (8): (8) The value range of Infor is in the range of [1,10]. The larger the Infor is, the higher the transparency of information is. The other variables in model (4) and model (5) are defined in the same way as model (3).

The test results of mediating effect are shown in Table 4. The test results of the above mediating effect model confirm that information transparency is the mediating variable of the effect of enterprise core competence on stock price synchronization. Enterprise core competence improves the company’s information transpawrency, creates a good environment for the integration of company specific information into stock trading, and then reduces stock price synchronicity.

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Table 4. Mechanism test: The mediating effect of information transparency.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t004

4.6. Robustness test

4.6.1. Change the measurement index of core competence.

In order to enhance the robustness of our conclusion, we respectively used Core1 = ln (core competence kind + 1), Core2 = core competence intensity, and Core3 = core competence kind as alternative measurement indexes of core competence’s strength and regressed model (3) again. The regression results are shown in Table 5. The results show that: after changing the measurement method of core competence, the coefficient of core competence (Core1, Core2, Core3) is still significantly negative, which further supports the conclusion of this paper.

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Table 5. Robustness test: Changing the measurement method of core competence.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t005

4.6.2. Change stock price synchronicity index.

In the existing research on stock price synchronicity, some scholars choose the following model to calculate its measurement index: (9) The variable meaning involved in model (9) is consistent with model (1), and the difference is that market and industry return data with lag period are not added. calculated from model (9) is substituted into model (2) to perform operation, and the alternative index Synch2 is obtained. Synch2 is used as the explanatory variable, and the four measurement methods of core competence are regressed in combination with the previous robustness test. The empirical results are reported in Table 6. It can be seen that after the model (9) is used to recalculate the stock price synchronicity, no matter which way to measure the core competence, the coefficient of the core competence variable of the enterprise is still significantly negative, which enhances the robustness of the research conclusion in this paper.

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Table 6. Robustness test: Change the calculation method of stock price synchronization.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t006

4.6.3. Delete "stock disaster" year sample.

Considering the reality of the development of China’s capital market, in 2015, after nearly half a year’s booming bull market, the A-share market experienced systemic financial risks, which witnessed the extreme trend of the sharp rise and fall of the market index. In the rare case of one thousand shares going up or down at the same time, it is difficult for listed companies to reflect their own characteristic information, there is a serious phenomenon of stock price synchronicity. Based on the above background, in order to avoid the interference of extreme data on the reliability and accuracy of the empirical results, this paper eliminated the observation data in 2015, and took the observation data in the remaining years as the sample to conduct multiple linear regression on model (3), model (4) and model (5). The regression results are shown in Table 7. After excluding the extreme data in 2015, the regression coefficients of core competence (Core) and information transparency (Infor) in model (3), model (4) and model (5) are still significant at least 5%, and the sign direction is consistent with the expectation. Sobel test showed that Z value of mediating effect was—4.89, which was significant at 1% level. The above results show that, after eliminating the extreme observation samples, the conclusion that "the core competence of enterprises can significantly reduce the stock price synchronicity, and the information transparency plays an intermediary role in it " is robust.

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Table 7. Robustness test: Excluding "stock disaster" year samples.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t007

4.6.4. Quantile regression.

Finally, this paper uses quantile regression to retest the research hypothesis, in order to exclude the influence of potential extreme value on the empirical results, and further enhance the robustness of the conclusion. The regression results in Table 8, the coefficients of core competence in all models are significantly negative at least 5%, which is consistent with the previous results and supports the empirical conclusion of this paper.

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Table 8. Robustness test: Quantile regression.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t008

5. Further research

5.1. Examine the impact of internal and external governance environment

As mentioned above, the core competence of enterprises will improve the transparency of information, thus inhibiting the synchronicity of stock prices. Furthermore, a large number of literatures show that the internal and external governance environment of a company has a significant impact on its information transparency. When the internal and external governance environment is better, the company’s information transparency is higher. On the contrary, the company’s information transparency is lower. Based on this, in the context of poor governance environment, the core competence of enterprises should play a greater role in improving the information transparency of the company, and the inhibitory effect on stock price synchronization is more significant. Next, combined with the specific internal and external governance environment, this paper will carry out further research on the above logic.

5.1.1. Internal governance environment.

In terms of internal governance environment, the motivation and behavior of management and major shareholders will have a significant impact on corporate information transparency. This paper analyzes the impact of internal governance environment from the following three dimensions.

(1) Earnings management level

Earnings management reduces the transparency of corporate information and increases the information asymmetry between the company and the outside world. This paper uses the modified Jones model [62] widely used by scholars to calculate the level of earnings management.

(2) Transparency of accounting information

Based on Bhattacharya et al. [63], Zhou and Wu [64], earnings incentive progress and earnings smoothness reflect the transparency of listed companies. This paper takes the average value after quantile sorting, and adopts assimilation processing to obtain the measurement index of accounting information transparency.

(3) Separation degree of two weights

This paper uses the difference between cash flow rights and control rights to measure the information transparency under the influence of large shareholders. The larger the difference is, the less optimistic the information environment is [65–67].

Based on the above analysis, this paper divides the research samples into two groups for regression analysis according to the "year industry" median of earnings management level, accounting information transparency and the separation of two rights. The empirical results are shown in Table 9. It is not difficult to see that in the group where the information transparency is low, the coefficient of core competence (Core) is significantly negative at least at the level of 5%. While the regression coefficients of core competence (Core) are not significant for the groups with high information transparency. It can be seen that when the company’s internal governance environment is poor and the information transparency is low, the corporate core competence has a more significant effect on the reduction of stock price synchronization.

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Table 9. Further research: Internal governance environment.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t009

5.1.2. External governance environment.

In terms of external governance environment, this paper studies the impact of information transparency on research topics from the aspects of capital market, product market and media supervision.

(1) Shareholding ratio of institutional investors

Previous studies have confirmed that institutional investors have played a positive role in optimizing the quality of corporate information [68, 69]. Therefore, based on the premise that institutional ownership is helpful to improve information disclosure, this paper uses its shareholding ratio as one of the external proxy variables to measure enterprise information transparency.

(2) Product market competition

Ren and Wang [70] confirmed that the fierce product market competition promoted the quality of information disclosure. This paper uses industry Herfindahl index as a proxy variable to focus on the impact of product market governance on the research topic.

(3) Media attention

As an informal system outside the law, the media has become an important part of the corporate governance system [71]. [72] pointed out that media attention constrained the phenomenon of earnings management and enhanced the information quality and capital market pricing efficiency. This paper uses "ln (1 + number of media reports)" to measure the amount of media attention. The more media attention, the higher the information transparency.

Based on the above analysis, this paper divides the research sample into two groups according to the "year industry" median of institutional investors’ shareholding ratio, product market competition intensity and media attention. The empirical report is listed in Table 10. It can be seen that the regression coefficient of core competence is significantly negative at least at 5% level in the group with low proportion of institutional investors and low intensity of product market competition, while it is not significant in the group with high proportion of institutional investors and high intensity of product market competition. After grouping regression according to media attention, the coefficient of core in the group with less media attention is smaller (the absolute value is larger), and the difference test results show that the coefficient difference between the two groups is statistically significant. The above results show that when the information transparency is low due to the poor external governance environment, the core competence of enterprises has a more significant effect on the decline of stock price synchronicity.

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Table 10. Further research: External governance environment.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t010

5.2. Explore the impact of changes in core competence

In the previous empirical part, we test the impact of different listed companies’ core competence differences on their stock price synchronicity, and prove that core competence can play a role in stabilizing stock price synchronicity. So, for the same listed company, will the change of core competence restrain the phenomenon of "rising and falling at the same time"? Theoretically speaking, if the listed companies disclose more core competence information in the current annual report, they should be able to transmit information content to the market, affect the trading decisions of investors, and be reflected in the stock price. Based on this, this paper intends to explore whether the changes of core competence of listed companies in different time dimensions can reduce their stock price synchronization from a vertical perspective.

According to the construction idea of core competence index, this paper measures the change degree of core competence in adjacent years according to the model (10): (10) The variable Core_Del is substituted into the model (3) to replace the variable Core for multiple linear regression. The regression results are shown in Table 11. Among them, the columns (2) and (4) are used for cluster processing at the company level on the basis of columns (1) and (3) respectively. It is not difficult to find that the coefficients Core_Del are all significantly negative, which means that as the core competence of listed companies increases, the synchronization of their stock prices gradually decreases. Based on this, from a vertical perspective, the dynamic improvement of core competence can transmit and release the most timely characteristic information, and map the fundamental information of individual stocks to investors’ trading decisions, thus playing a role in stabilizing the synchronization of stock prices.

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Table 11. Further research: Considering changes in core competence.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t011

5.3. The influence of different types of core competence

Next, this paper intends to subdivide the types of core competence and study whether there are differences in the impact of different types of core competence on stock price synchronization. Based on the previous analysis, this paper naturally attempts to focus on the following questions: compared with other types of core competence, does the core competence related to information transparency or information disclosure quality have a stronger inhibitory effect on stock price synchronicity? According to the text analysis of the annual reports of listed companies, the core competence of enterprises includes brand, technology, quality, marketing, capital and many other categories, among which the core competence related to information disclosure includes management and culture. Therefore, based on different categories, this paper divides the core competence into the core competence of information disclosure (Core_ Disclosure) and other core competence (Core_Others). In order to more intuitively explore whether the mechanism of the core competence of enterprises can reduce the stock price synchronization lies in the improvement of information transparency.

The empirical results are reported in Table 12. Among them, columns (1) and (2) separately test the Core_Disclosure and Core_Others, the two variables were significant at the 1% level, but the absolute value of the coefficient of Core_Disclosure is significantly higher than that of Core_Others. Add Core_ Disclosure and Core_Others variables to column (3), we can see that both significance and absolute value of Core_Disclosure is higher than Core_Others. The above results show that the core competence of enterprises reduces the synchronicity of stock price by improving the quality of information disclosure and information transparency, which further enriches the conclusion of this paper.

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Table 12. Further research: Distinguish the types of core competence.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t012

5.4. The influence of annual report regulation

The disclosure of enterprise core competence in annual report has experienced a change from voluntary disclosure to mandatory disclosure. In order to enhance the readability of the annual report and enable investors to contact and refer to more valuable contents, CSRC issued the “Public Securities Companies’ Information Disclosure Content and Format Guidelines No. 2: The Content and Format of Annual Reports (Revised in 2012)” on September 21, 2012. CSRC clearly requires listed companies to analyze their core competence from the 2012 annual report, disclosure of the basic content of the core competence, important changes and the impact on the company during the reporting period.

Based on the above background, this paper finally divides the sample into before 2012 and after 2012, and tests whether the relationship between core competence and stock price synchronicity is different. The empirical report is listed in Table 13. Comparing columns (1) and (2), we find that after the implementation of the annual report regulation, the number of observations of the core competence of enterprises has increased significantly, and the coefficient of the core competence has changed from insignificant to significant negative. On the one hand, the empirical results show that under the regulatory requirements of CSRC, the disclosure of core competence of listed companies is more adequate. On the other hand, more adequate disclosure of core competence information provides investors with more valuable company characteristics information, which is conducive to investors to make rational investment decisions, and promotes heterogeneous company information to be absorbed by stock price, thus inhibiting stock price synchronicity.

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Table 13. Further research: Considering annual report regulation.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259409.t013

6. Conclusion and enlightenment

Based on the annual reports of China’s A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2017, this paper uses text analysis technology as a tool to empirically test the impact of core competence on stock price synchronicity by constructing enterprise core competence indicators. It is found that there is a significant negative correlation between core competence and stock price synchronization, that is, the stronger the core competence is, the lower the stock price synchronization is. The mediating effect test shows that the core competence of enterprises improves the information transparency, and then reduces the level of stock price synchronization. Further research shows that the core competence has a more significant effect on the decline of stock price synchronization in the companies with poor internal and external governance environment. In the process of enhancing the core competence, the synchronization of the company’s stock price gradually weakens. Compared with other types, the core competence related to information disclosure plays a stronger role in reducing stock price synchronization. Finally, this paper finds that after the CSRC forces listed companies to disclose their core competence information in their annual reports, the core competence plays a more significant role in reducing the stock price synchronicity. The theoretical contribution of this paper is to expand the application of the research on the economic consequences of core competence in the field of capital market, and enrich the relevant literature on the influencing factors of stock price synchronicity.

In practice, this study has important policy implications for regulators, listed companies and investors: (1) for regulatory authorities, the conclusion of this paper shows that adequate information disclosure, as the core of the capital market, plays an important role in improving the efficiency of information transmission and playing the role of resource allocation. The mandatory disclosure of core competence information in the annual report of listed companies is conducive to reducing the synchronicity of share prices in the capital market, which confirms the positive role of the annual report regulatory policy of the CSRC. (2) For listed companies, on the one hand, the conclusions of this paper remind listed companies to improve corporate governance, strengthen information disclosure, and create a transparent and excellent information transmission environment, so as to make full use of the capital market to optimize the allocation of resources. At the same time, it emphasizes that the core competence plays an important role in the performance of the company’s capital market. The company should pay full attention to the construction of core competence, win competitive opportunities for enterprises, build a permanent foundation, and create inexhaustible power. (3) For investors, the conclusion of this paper means that investors should deeply analyze the core competence of listed companies, comprehensively evaluate the resources and capabilities of enterprises in combination with the internal and external environment. Then investors can form a rational judgment on the subject value, and maximize the investment efficiency and avoid investment risks.

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