Assessing the effectiveness of innovative city pilots in improving urban carbon emission performance: A spatial difference-in-difference approach

Existing studies have focused on the impact of innovation carbon emission performance but ignore importance government support for innovation. To overcome this challenge, paper adopts a spatial difference-in-difference (DID) model to assess urban based quasi-natural experiment innovative city pilots (ICP) in China. Using high-resolution data 1 km × 238 cities from 2008 2019 China, employees an extended stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) measure performance. Our findings indicate that ICP implementation leads 1.3% improvement local Meanwhile, there is significant spillover effect implementation, with 3.3% surrounding areas. The results mechanism suggest affects by promoting total factor productivity improvement, green innovation, and industrial upgrading. Further shows has strongest eastern region, stronger large resource-dependent cities. Finally, carries out series robustness tests ensure reliability analytical results, including parallel trend tests, placebo re-estimation different methods. Based findings, proposes feasible policy recommendations terms continuous promotion support, regional cooperation differentiated formulation.