The impact of circulation network construction on urban resilience: evidence from the layout of circulation node cities in China

Against the backdrop of rising global economic uncertainty and increasingly frequent multidimensional shocks, enhancing urban resilience (UR) has become critical to ensuring the stable functioning of cities and promoting high-quality development. This study treats China's circulation node city layout policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a difference-in-differences approach using panel data for 280 prefecture-level and above cities from 2008 to 2023 to systematically examine the impact of circulation network construction (CNC) on UR and its underlying mechanisms. The results show that CNC significantly enhances UR, and this finding remains robust to a series of robustness checks and treatments for potential endogeneity. Mechanism analysis reveals that CNC enhances UR through four channels: scale effects, structural effects, technological effects, and supply chain buffering effects, which strengthen cities' carrying capacity, adjustment capacity, adaptive capacity, and recovery capacity, respectively. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that the resilience-enhancing effect of CNC is more pronounced in coastal cities, cities located southeast of the Hu Huanyong Line, and cities with higher levels of marketization and more advanced digital infrastructure. These findings provide insights for optimizing circulation node layouts and building more resilient cities.