Whether maintaining a close relationship with China can benefit economic performance in the postpandemic era is a crucial concern for countries around the world. This study employs the difference‐in‐difference (DID) model and propensity score matching to estimate the impact of connecting people proposed by the Belt and Road Initiate (BRI) on the subnational economic development of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) cities. The quasi‐natural experiment of DID is based on the establishment of China–ASEAN friendship cities. We capture the ASEAN subnational economic development by calibrated satellite nighttime light data. Our findings show that the establishment of a friendship‐city relationship has a positive impact on the subnational economic development of China–ASEAN cities. Further analysis indicates that bilateral trade, China's direct investment in contracted projects, and mutual visits by national leaders may be the underlying channels for boosting the economic development of China–ASEAN friendship cities. This study contributes to the literature on friendship city and provides ex‐ante implications on the BRI from the perspective of connecting people with first‐hand empirical evidence.

We take the economic stimulus package in China as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the effect of urban credit expansion on the quality of green innovation at the city level. The analysis takes urban-level and firm-level data from 2004 to 2015 and adopts the PSM-DID approach. Our empirical results suggest that the implementation of credit expansion makes a significant contribution to the improvement of green patent quality. In addition, the mechanism suggests that urban credit expansion policies promote corporate green innovation through channels such as providing credit expansion and a lower cost of financing enterprise transformation and upgrading. This research also suggest that credit expansion promotes economic growth while also incentivising first-tier cities to engage in more green transformations and upgrade to improve the quality of green patents. Our findings also provide an important insight for the implementation of credit expansion policies and the achievement of sustainable development in countries around the world, particularly in developing countries. Finally, this paper argues that China’s credit expansion policy in 2009 has played a role in improving the quality of green innovation and improving green transformation.