Pilot Cities for Innovation and Clusters of High-Tech Talent

Abstract

The pilot policy for national innovative cities is a key institutional arrangement in China's efforts to promote the innovation-driven development strategy and accelerate the construction of an innovative country. This paper regards this pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment and, based on the panel data of 29 major Chinese cities from 2002 to 2019, uses a multi-period differ-ence-in-differences (DID) model to systematically assess the causal effect of the pilot policy on the spatial agglomeration of high-tech talents. The empirical re-sults show that the policy has significantly enhanced the agglomeration level of high-tech talents in the pilot cities. The heterogeneity analysis further reveals that there are obvious regional differences in the policy effects: the agglomera-tion of high-tech talents in cities of the eastern, central, and western regions has all been promoted, with the eastern region benefiting the most, followed by the western region, and the central region being relatively weaker. This reflects that the policy effects are closely related to the regional economic development level and innovation foundation. The national innovative city policy, by providing a series of support measures, offers more R&D opportunities and better innova-tion conditions for high-tech talents, thereby attracting such talents to agglom-erate in the pilot cities.