Public Data Trading Platforms and Sustainable Urban Productivity: Evidence from China

Improving resource allocation efficiency and fostering innovation are important dimensions of sustainable urban economic development. Public data trading platforms may contribute to these objectives by facilitating data circulation, reducing information frictions, and improving the coordination of productive resources. However, empirical evidence on their implications for urban productivity remains limited. This study examines the effects of public data trading platform establishment on urban total factor productivity (TFP), drawing on prefecture-level city panel data from China covering 2010–2024. By exploiting the staggered establishment of these platforms as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) framework to estimate their productivity effects and investigate potential transmission mechanisms. The results indicate that public data trading platform establishment is positively associated with urban TFP after controlling for city and year fixed effects. The findings also reveal a positive association between platform establishment and technological innovation. Further mechanism analyses suggest that high-level human-capital agglomeration and the spatial agglomeration of scientific and technological resources may represent additional pathways linking data-market institutions to urban productivity. These findings highlight the potential role of institutional infrastructure for data exchange in supporting innovation-driven growth and more efficient resource utilization. From a sustainability perspective, the study provides evidence relevant to the socioeconomic and institutional dimensions of sustainable urban development and suggests that policies promoting data accessibility, effective data governance, and complementary innovation capabilities may help strengthen the foundations of long-term urban productivity. The results do not directly measure environmental sustainability and should therefore be interpreted primarily in terms of economic and institutional sustainability.