Research on the Impact of Innovative City and Smart City Construction on Digital Economy: Evidence from China

Does the national innovation city and smart city pilot policy, as an important institutional design to promote the transformation of old and new dynamics, have an important impact on the digital economy? What are the intrinsic mechanisms? Based on the theoretical analysis of whether smart city and national innovation city policies promote urban digital economy, this paper constructs a multi-temporal double difference model based on a quasi-natural experiment with urban dual pilot policies and systematically investigates the impact of dual pilot policies on the development of digital economy. It is found that both smart cities and national innovation cities can promote the development of digital economy, while there is a synergistic effect between the policies. The mechanism test shows that the smart city construction and national innovation city construction mainly affect the digital economy through talent agglomeration effect, technology agglomeration effect and financial agglomeration effect.