Jun Wu

This study used Staggered DID on the panel data of 254 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2016 to explore the promotion effect and mechanism of innovative city pilot policy on urban brand development. The research shows that compared with cities without the pilot policy, the construction of innovative cities can increase the city brand value by 10% and has significantly promoted eastern, non-central cities with large populations and higher levels of science and education. Innovative city pilot policy can promote city brand development through cultural inheritance and innovation and entrepreneurship mechanisms. The results indicate that innovative city pilot policy has a significant spatial spillover effect on city brand development. Our findings add to the field of city brand evaluation by providing policy suggestions and experiential references for evaluating city brand development.

Green innovation precisely reflects China’s new development concept and is the general trend for urban development in the future. In addition, e-commerce might become an important breakthrough platform to promote urban green innovation. In order to explore the impact of the construction of national e-commerce demonstration cities on urban green innovation, this paper aimed to theoretically analyze the potential relationship between the two and the transmission mechanism. At the same time, we have examined the panel data from 297 prefecture level cities in China from 2005 to 2018 to explore the implementation effect of the pilot policies by using difference-in-differences and carried out a series of robustness tests. The results showed that: (i) The pilot policy of e-commerce demonstration cities exhibited a significant promotion effect on the green innovation capacity of the different cities, and in general, the promotion effect of the pilot policy is dynamically sustainable. (ii) Analysis of the further influence mechanism showed that the pilot policy could effectively promote the development of urban green innovation capacity by enhancing the level of urban informatization, thereby attracting the concentration of scientific and technological talents. This in turn can facilitate urban innovation and the entrepreneurship environment, among which the boosting effect of optimizing the urban innovation and entrepreneurship environment was the greatest. (iii) In terms of heterogeneity, the pilot policies showed significant positive effects on all the regions to which the cities belong, while the boosting effects were more significant for cities with large populations, non-central cities, and the general science and education cities. The findings of this study not only enrich the research results in the field of urban green innovation, but also have clear policy implications, which can provide useful guidance and reference value for the work of relevant departments.