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.

This essay investigates how innovative city policy affect green growth. It employs data from 284 prefecture-level cities in China between 2007 and 2019, green total factor productivity index as a gauge of green growth, innovative city policy as a quasinatural experiment, and a multi-period DID approach to examine how such policy affects green total factor productivity. The results of the study show that on the average the green total factor productivity of innovative pilot cities is 0.95% higher compared to non-pilot cities, indicating that an innovative city policy has a significant contribution to green growth. This result also survived in robustness tests. In addition, this study finds that in the impact of innovative city policy on green growth is heterogeneous across city scale and resource, with the driving effect being more pronounced in medium-sized cities and nonresource-based cities.

Under China's national development concept of "innovation-driven development strategy", the emergence of digital media sources has overturned the traditional media landscape and information dissemination channels, which will certainly have a significant impact on corporate innovation. In this paper, we use media as a measure of Internet media information reports to examine the intrinsic mechanism of digital media information transmission affecting enterprise innovation. The study finds that digital media information dissemination significantly contributes to corporate innovation. The mechanism analysis shows that the core of digital media information dissemination for corporate innovation lies in the supervisory governance effect. This is demonstrated by the fact that digital media information dissemination helps to improve corporate governance and reduce agency conflicts. Heterogeneity analysis shows that digital media dissemination has a stronger effect on promoting innovation in firms with low information transparency and high opinion pressure, influenced by reputation incentives. This paper contributes to a deep and comprehensive understanding of the role of media in capital markets in the Internet environment and has important policy implications.