Investigates corporate innovation outcomes in China, suggesting significant but varied improvements.
This study investigates whether China’s Sci-Tech Finance Pilot Policy (STFP) affects corporate innovation and financial performance. Using panel data from 2010 to 2024 and employing a difference‑in‑differences approach, we find that STFP is associated with higher R&D intensity, R&D expenditure, patent output, and innovation efficiency on the innovation side, and with lower financing constraints, leverage, and debt costs, as well as higher cash holdings on the financial side. Event study diagnostics and HonestDiD sensitivity analyses indicate that the most robust effects of STFP are concentrated on debt costs and patent output, while evidence for the other indicators is weaker. Moderation analyses show that the policy effects are asymmetrically moderated by corporate demand for resource expansion, subsidy acquisition, and political connections. Therefore, the STFP yields significant improvements, but these improvements are neither homogeneous nor equally strong across outcome measures and firm characteristics.
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Wu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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