Research On The Impact Of Regional Development Policy On Firm Innovations

As China's economy enters the stage of high-quality development,it is hard to sustain the development model solely relying on traditional factor-driven development,and it is urgent to achieve a fundamental shift to innovation-driven development.As the main body of innovation activities,th e improvement of firm innovation capabilities is not only an important part of adhering to the path of independent innovation with Chinese characteristics,building an innovative country,and boosting high-quality economic development,but also an inevitab le requirement for reshaping China's new advantages in international cooperation and competition and advancing the new development pattern of dual circulation.As an important policy issued in the process of reform and opening-up in China,regional development policies represented by technological innovation,industrial development and environmental protection have provided favorable support for promoting the coordinated development of regional economies and forming a regional economic layout with complementary advantages and high-quality development.At the same time,it also profoundly affects the innovation and development of enterprises through direct and indirect policy instruments,such as financial subsidies and market competition.In this context,it is an important topic for academia and policy makers to scientifically evaluate the effects of the currently widely implemented regional development policies on firm innovations.On the basis of introducing the definition of regional development policies and firm innovation,this article reviews classical theories and related empirical studies such as institutional change theory,industrial agglomeration theory,regional innovation system theory and Porter hypothesis theory.Then,we construct an analysis framework for the impact of different types of regional development policies on firm innovations.And we populate the Micro-enterprise databases such as Annual Survey of Industrial Firms database,firm patent filing received by the State Intellectual Property Office and Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed company data,as well as urban panel data,built the econometric models to evaluate the effects of regional innovation policy,regional key industrial policy,regional industrial park policy,and regional environmental policy on firm innovations by using the difference-in-difference model.Furthermore,we have empirically identified the differential impact and its channels of different types of regional development policies on firm innovations.Firstly,different from the existing research on the evaluation of regional innovation policy effects,it still focuses on the macro level.U sing the pilot project of innovative cities as a quasi-natural experiment,this paper populates the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms database and firm patent filing received by the State Intellectual Property Office from 2006 to 2013,to estimate the microeconomic effect of regional innovation policy using the difference-in-difference method.The study shows that the pilot project of innovative cities is conducive to improving firm innovations,and this impact is heterogeneous at the level of patent types,industries,and firm's characteristics.From the perspective of the heterogeneity of patent types,this policy is conducive to the increase in the number of invention patents application,but has no effect on the increase in the number of utility models and design patents application;from the perspective of industry heterogeneity,this policy has promoted firm innovations in high-capital-intensive industries,with no effect in low-capital-intensive industries;from the perspective of firms' characteristics,this policy has mainly promoted the innovations of large firms,with no impact on small firms.The inspection of the impact channels shows that government subsidies and market competition effects are important channels for the pilot project of innovative cities to influence firm innovations,while the intellectual property protection effect is not obvious.Secondly,the existing research on the evaluation of the effects of regional industrial policies mainly discusses the impact of regional industrial policies on industry and firm productivity,spatial resource allocation,and local government land transfer behavior from the national and provincial levels.In this manuscript,we take the key industries mentioned in the “Eleventh Five-Year” and “Twelfth Five-Year”plans of 248 prefecture-level and above cities as the research object and empirically estimate the microeconomic effects of regional key industrial policies from city level.The study shows that urban key industrial policy has significantly improved firm innovations as a whole.The inspection of the impact channels shows that urban key industry policies can promote firm innovations by increasing the degree of urban industrial market competition and urban industrial agglomeration.Further,from the perspective of firm and industry heterogeneity,we find that these positive effects are mainly concentrated in state-owned,private,large firms,and high-capital-intensive industries,and state-owned,private firms,and firms in high-capital-intensive industries have strategic innovation behaviors that are biased towards applying for utility model patents,with non-significant effects for foreign,small firms and low-capital-intensive industries.Thirdly,the existing research on regional industrial park policies mainly focuses on evaluating the impact of the establishment of national economic and technological development zones and provincial development zones on the regional economy,industrial adjustment,and firm productivity,export,and financial performance.Taking the establishment of a national high-tech zone as a quasi-natural experiment,this paper uses the data of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from2005 to 2019,and employs difference-in-difference methods to explore the microeconomic effects of the regional industrial park policy from the perspective of firm innovation.The study shows that the establi shment of a national high-tech zone is conducive to improving the level of firm innovation input in the zone,and it also has a positive effect on firm innovation output.The inspection of the impact channels shows that financial subsidies and human capita l are important channels for the establishment of national high-tech zones to influence firm innovations,while taxation and credit channels are not obvious.Further analysis results show that from the perspective of firm heterogeneity,the establishment o f national high-tech zones has a significantly positive effect on the R&D input of state-owned,non-state-owned,and large firms,with non-significant effects for small and medium-sized firms;from the perspective of industry heterogeneity,this positive e ffect both exists in high-tech and non-high-tech industries.Finally,previous studies on the evaluation of regional environmental policy effects have mostly focused on the impact of command-and-control and market-based regional environmental policies.Taking the 2008 environmental information disclosure policy as a quasi-natural experiment,this paper uses the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms database and firm patent filing received by the State Intellectual Property Office from 2006 to 2013 to examine th e impact of information disclosure-based regional environmental policy on firm innovations using the difference-in-difference method.The study shows that the environmental information disclosure policy implemented by China can exert the effects of Porter' s hypothesis and significantly improve the firm innovations.The inspection of the impact channels shows that firm R&D investment and capital constraints are important channels for information disclosure environmental regulations to encourage enterprises t o carry out innovative activities.Further analysis found that the environmental information disclosure policy has mainly increased the number of firm invention patents and utility model patents;in coastal areas with high economic development levels,this policy has significantly improved firm innovations.From the perspective of enterprise heterogeneity,this policy has a significantly positive effect on innovations of private firms with relatively scarce social resources.In addition,a series of robustn ess tests all support the conclusions of this study.The above research conclusions have important policy implications for exploring the relationship between regional development policies and firm innovations,optimizing regional development policies and realizing the enhancement of firm innovation capabilities.