Scaling innovation: unveiling urban factors shaping creativity

It is crucial to explain the city scale effect from the perspective of innovation, which directly affects the formulation of city governance policies and, ultimately, city well-being. This paper employs urban panel data from China spanning the years 2008–2018 to empirically investigate the causal link between city size, measured by population, and the number of innovation outputs. The empirical results show that city size has a significant positive impact on the quantity of innovation output. Mechanism testing shows that knowledge spillover effects and high-skilled labor selection effects have credible explanatory power for city size effects. The research conclusions of this article have certain practical significance for urban governance and related policy formulation.