To meet regulatory requirements, enhance financing capabilities, and optimize financial performance, firms often resort to accounting practices such as off-balance-sheet debt and debt-equity hybrids to manipulate leverage, artificially reducing reported leverage levels. Although such leverage manipulation may temporarily alleviate regulatory and financing pressures, it leads to a series of profound long-term harms, including concealing debt risks and distorting resource allocation efficiency. In exploring governance mechanisms for corporate leverage manipulation, existing research has constructed a constraint framework combining internal and external dimensions from four perspectives: government regulation, financial supervision, governance optimization, and technological empowerment. However, it has not yet fully recognized the unique governance functions of data assets and their information disclosure within the context of the digital economy. Based on this, this paper investigates the potential impact of data asset information disclosure on corporate leverage manipulation, aiming to provide empirical references for government departments in refining data asset information disclosure systems and for micro-enterprises in optimizing financial leverage strategies. This study utilizes data from A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2007 to 2023 to examine the impact of data asset information disclosure on corporate leverage manipulation. The findings reveal that data asset information disclosure significantly inhibits corporate leverage manipulation, primarily through two pathways: reducing agency costs and alleviating financing constraints. Moderation effect analysis indicates that the Interim Provisions on Accounting Treatment of Enterprise Data Resources significantly strengthens this inhibitory effect. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that this inhibitory effect is more pronounced when the financial environment is poorer, external supervision is weaker, internal governance is inferior, and holding more data assets. Economic consequence tests show that this inhibitory effect significantly reduces firms' debt default risk. Spillover effect tests demonstrate that this inhibitory effect generates spillover effects at both the industry and regional levels. The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows: First, existing literature primarily examines the financing effects of data asset information disclosure from the perspectives of financing constraints and financing costs, without focusing on manipulative behaviors where firms artificially adjust reported leverage through off-balance-sheet debt or debt-equity hybrids. This paper adds a research perspective on the governance of financing behaviors concerning data asset information disclosure and provides new empirical evidence for understanding its information effects and governance functions. Second, existing studies largely concentrate on the constraining roles of government regulation, financial supervision, governance optimization, and technological empowerment on leverage manipulation, yet have not fully appreciated the potential governance function of data assets and their information disclosure. This paper broadens the research perspective on factors influencing corporate leverage manipulation and highlights the significant role of data asset information disclosure in curbing financial manipulation. Third, prior research has mainly focused on the impact of data asset information disclosure on the disclosing firm's own behavior, without adequately examining its potential spillover effects at the industry and regional levels. The practical implications of this paper are twofold: On the one hand, for government departments, there is a need to continuously improve the institutional system for data asset information disclosure and implement differentiated and precise regulation. On the other hand, for enterprises, it is essential to transform their understanding of data asset information disclosure from a passive compliance burden into an active strategic management tool, integrating it closely with their unique resource endowments and the industry-regional ecosystem in practice.