How Does The Integration Of Urban Agglomerations Affect Enterprise Investment

Under the background of the "double cycle" new development pattern and the construction of a large domestic unified market,we need to establish efficient regulations,fair competition,and fully open the unified national market,so as to gradually break local protection and market segmentation,promote the circulation of factors such as goods and capital in a greater scope.In this process,urban agglomerations with central cities as the core are playing an important role in removing barriers to resource flow,enhancing economic and population carrying capacity,and driving the overall improvement of national economic efficiency.Therefore,on the premise of maintaining the national unified large market,it is necessary to give priority to the construction of regional market integration and establish and improve regional cooperation mechanisms,so as to provide a spatial basis for the construction of the national unified large market.In recent years,in order to promote high-quality regional development,the state has introduced a series of integrated development plans and policies for urban agglomerations.By the end of 2019,the state had released 11 plans for urban clusters,including the Outline of Coordinated Development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region and the Reply of The State Council on the Development Plan for Urban Clusters in the Middle reaches of the Yangtze River.After the implementation of the planning outline,relevant regions have successively introduced a series of policy implementation measures,which cover the construction of regional coordination mechanism,transportation infrastructure interconnection,industry collaboration,the construction of high-standard market system and many other aspects.These measures have an important impact on the removal of trans-regional flow barriers of factors and the promotion of regional integration.In view of this,based on the background of domestic unified large market construction and urban agglomeration development,this paper studies the impact of urban agglomeration integration policy on enterprises’ cross-regional investment in urban agglomeration.Based on the free entrepreneur model(FE model),this paper analyzes the micro-mechanism of the influence of integration policies on enterprise investment,and analyzes the heterogeneity of integration policies from geographical location,market size and competitive environment.At the same time,based on the relevant theories of enterprise investment,this paper also analyzes the mechanism of the influence of urban agglomeration integration policy on enterprise investment from the perspectives of regional coordination mechanism,transportation infrastructure and boundary effect.Then,based on the analysis above,this paper takes the data of Chinese A-share listed companies’ long-distance investment from 2008 to 2019 as research samples,and uses propensity score matching – difference-difference method(PSM-DID)to empirically test the above theoretical hypothesis.The results of this paper show that:(1)the integration policy of urban agglomeration effectively promotes the investment amount of enterprises in the region,and the basic result is still valid after a series of robustness tests including replacement matching ratio,consideration of other policies,tail reduction treatment and instrumental variable method.(2)Heterogeneity analysis shows that the policy effect of coastal urban agglomeration is more obvious from the perspective of geographical location difference;From the difference of market scale level,the policy effect is more obvious in regions with larger market scale.From the difference of the regional market competition,the higher the degree of regional market competition,the policy effect is more obvious.(3)The result of the mechanism analysis shows that,on the one hand,the boundary effect caused by provincial administrative boundary will have a negative impact on the policy effect of urban agglomeration integration.On the other hand,the implementation of urban agglomeration integration policy promotes the number of enterprise investment in the region through the improvement of regional coordination mechanism and the improvement of inter-regional transport infrastructure.Accordingly,the paper puts forward corresponding policy enlightenments from the status quo of regional development,the improvement of transportation infrastructure and the establishment of coordination mechanism of regional development,so as to promote the reasonable construction of urban agglomerations and the high-quality development of regional economy.