Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the impact of digital inclusive finance on entrepreneurial activities in rural areas, as well as the underlying mechanisms and the variations of this impact across regions and household characteristics.Design/methodology/approach: Utilizing the China Household Finance Survey Data, this paper applies the Two-Stage Least Squares with instrumental variables to assess the effect of digital inclusive finance on rural entrepreneurship.Findings: The empirical findings indicate that digital inclusive finance significantly promotes entrepreneurial activities in rural areas by alleviating credit constraints, reducing financial information barriers, and altering risk attitudes for rural households. Additionally, this effect is more pronounced in the eastern region of China and for the “opportunity entrepreneurial activities.” Furthermore, the impact varies across rural households' income and consumption status, as well as the personal characteristics of household heads.Originality/value: Firstly, this study broadens our understanding of the mechanisms through which digital inclusive finance influences entrepreneurial activities, thereby filling a gap in existing entrepreneurship research. Secondly, the study's findings affirm the inclusive nature of digital finance, contributing significantly to the literature on regional equality and illuminating potential pathways toward achieving “common prosperity.”

Can environmental regulation promote green innovation and the productivity of cities? The “Compliance Cost” (CC) perspective and the “Porter Hypothesis” (PH) offer contrasting views, whereas the existing empirical results are inconclusive. This paper aims to highlight the roles of multifaceted government interventions, including government-to-firm subsidies, tax levies on firms, and environmental infrastructure provisions, in moderating environmental regulation for realizing PH. Based on the fixed-effects models for Chinese prefecture cities from 2005–2013, we found that environmental regulation positively impacted green innovation but negatively affected productivity. The results of moderating effects suggest that environmental regulation can better promote green innovation if it is compounded with more government-to-firm subsidies, lower firm tax burdens, and increased environmental infrastructure provisions. We further decomposed the impacts of these interventions across seven fields of green innovation and found that subsidy and tax burden relief were especially effective in facilitating more GI in the sector of transportation and alternative energy production. This paper amplifies the theoretical framework of PH by accentuating the analytical lens of multifaceted government interventions but also provides insights into how local governments can effectively design “carrot-and-stick” policies to realize PH at the city level.

Economies producing more complex products tend to be wealthier and grow more quickly. Therefore, a key issue for cities around the world is to develop new specialisations into more complex industries. In China, local governments tend to use urban land allocation as a tool to attract new firms from specific industries and promote industrial growth. However, relatively little is known about how this policy tool is related to the economic complexity of Chinese cities. Drawing upon the recent literature on the principle of relatedness and economic complexity, this paper investigates the relationship between industrial land policy (ILP) and the diversification of Chinese cities into more complex industries. The empirical results support our hypothesis that cities providing higher intensity of land subsidy are more likely to enter new industries and the more complex ones in particular.