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Background Whether place-based circular-economy policy can strengthen urban ecological resilience remains an open question in environmental economics. China’s Zero-Waste City (ZWC) pilot, covering 11 cities and 5 special zones in 2019 and expanded to 113 prefectures in 2022, provides the largest such policy experiment to date, and a natural setting in which to test this question. Methods Using a panel of 296 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2010 to 2023, we exploit the two-wave staggered rollout of the ZWC pilot in a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) framework with city and year fixed effects and cluster-robust standard errors. Identification is assessed through an event-study, the Callaway–Sant’Anna group-time estimator, an instrumental-variable specification, 500-replication permutation placebo tests, PSM-DID, and a battery of specification perturbations. We then examine three mechanism channels (green innovation, industrial upgrading, and carbon emissions) and trace treatment heterogeneity along city-capacity and environmental-pressure dimensions. Results ZWC designation significantly raises urban ecological resilience: the benchmark DID coefficient is between 0.0050 and 0.0070 and remains statistically significant at conventional levels across five progressively demanding specifications, including one that absorbs province-by-year fixed effects. The event study reveals no differential pre-trends ( p = 0.3620 ) and a gradually rising post-treatment profile. The IV-2SLS estimate is 0.1052 ( p 0.01 , first-stage F = 29.33 ), supporting the causal interpretation while requiring the exclusion restriction discussed below. Sub-dimension decomposition shows that the resilience gain is concentrated entirely in the adaptability (green-infrastructure) dimension, with null effects on resistance and recovery, consistent with a sequencing in which innovation and structural channels manifest first as green-infrastructure gains before translating into pollution-abatement and emission-reduction outcomes over longer horizons. Three mechanisms operate simultaneously: green invention patents rise ( + 0.1033 , p 0.05 ), industrial-structure advancement accelerates ( + 0.0579 , p 0.1 ), and city-level carbon emissions decline ( − 0.0313 , p 0.1 ). Subgroup estimates are consistently larger and significant in high-capacity cities (eastern, large, high-density) and in cities with heavier baseline PM 2.5 burden or LCC co-enrollment. Chow structural-change tests confirm significant heterogeneity across all five dimensions (all p 0.001 ), indicating that the treatment effect varies systematically with city capacity and environmental conditions. Conclusion Zero-Waste City construction generates modest but robust and causally identified gains in urban ecological resilience. The effect is mediated by innovation, structural upgrading, and decarbonization, and is strongest in cities with stronger implementation capacity and higher environmental stress. The evidence supports the continued expansion of circular-economy pilots as a complement to rather than a substitute for broader environmental and low-carbon policy packages.
Li et al. (Mon,) studied this question.