Urban innovation has been highly regarded as a modern urban model that drives sustainable urban development by synthesizing knowledge innovation and technological innovation in industrial processes. As such, numerous studies have emerged to investigate the impact of the innovative city pilot policy (ICP), yet the impact of the ICP on industrial structure upgrading has not been explicitly studied. To address the research gap, this study utilizes the ICP in China as a quasi-natural experiment and investigates the impact of the ICP on industrial structure upgrading in Chinese cities. We apply a DID model estimation on a panel dataset of 284 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2007 to 2019. The results indicate that the innovative city pilot policy greatly helps to upgrade the industrial structure in pilot cities, with the upgrading outcome particularly evident in large and non-natural resource-based cities. Mechanism analyses further reveal three channels via which the ICP promotes industrial structure upgrading, specifically by improving innovation capacity, boosting labor clustering, and lowering pollutant emissions. The results of this study carry significant policy implications for China in building a sustainable and modernized economic system and for other emerging nations in seeking economic transformation and industrial structure upgrading.

A parametric stochastic frontier analysis approach is employed to examine the cost and profit efficiency of banks in New Zealand over the study period of 2002–2011. Our result shows that foreign banks exhibit higher average cost and profit efficiency than domestic banks. We further document that Australian-owned banks operate more efficiently than foreign banks from other nations, supporting the limited global advantage hypothesis. Other distinguishing determinants of banks’ cost and profit efficiencies are bank size, equity ratio, asset quality, market concentration, interest rate, inflation and unemployment level. Lincoln University (LU).

This article examines the impact of stock market liquidity on bank liquidity creation in Malaysia. Our results indicate that a stock market enhances the liquidity creation of banks both on and off the banks’ balance sheets when the market liquidity increases. Further analysis shows that the positive impact of stock market liquidity is evident on the liquidity creation of publicly listed banks as the banks’ cost of equity finance becomes cheaper. Our results are robust to the influence of the 2008 financial crisis and different estimation methods. Our results refute the traditional view that increased stock market liquidity “steals” banks’ business and crowds out bank liquidity creation.