Land Policy and Enterprise Innovation Efficiency: Evidence from the Standard Land Reform in China

We exploit the staggered rollout of the Standard Land Reform across Chinese cities as a quasi-natural experiment to examine its impact on enterprise innovation efficiency. Using a sample of A-share listed companies from 2013 to 2020, we find that the reform significantly increases enterprise-level innovation efficiency by approximately 4.86%. This result remains robust across a series of robustness checks. Mechanism analyses reveal that the reform promotes innovation through reducing transaction costs, increasing fiscal subsidies, and strengthening regional intellectual property protection. Heterogeneity analyses show that the effect is more pronounced for enterprises with higher financing constraints, higher human capital, and greater media attention, as well as in more competitive industries and regions with stronger intellectual property protection. Our findings provide enterprise-level causal evidence that improving land allocation efficiency can foster enterprise innovation, offering policy implications for leveraging institutional reforms in land allocation to promote innovation-driven development.