Digital Finance,Path Breakthrough and High-quality Innovation in Manufacturing
Innovation-driven development has become the fundamental driver for China to achieve high-quality growth.The transformation from an incremental innovation model to a breakthrough innovation model has become necessary to strengthen China's self-reliance on scientific and technological development.Promoting the shift in the innovation path of micro entities represented by manufacturing and constructing virtuous cycles of"science-technology-industry-finance"can be an effective path.Digital finance plays a vital role in this process.As a new financial model based on digital technology that facilitates financing,payment,and investment,digital finance is inclusive,intelligent,and low-cost.Represented by mobile payments,digital insurance,and internet lending,digital finance improves the efficiency of financial services and integration with the real economy.A potential path is to optimize the development of digital finance to promote the upgrading of the manufacturing innovation path.Can emerging models represented by digital finance effectively enhance innovation development in the real economy and promote the transformation of China's innovation model from incremental to breakthrough?Studying this issue will provide an important micro-level theoretical basis for China's high-quality development.The current literature has some limitations in analyzing the mechanisms and measurements of how digital finance affects corporate innovation.First,existing studies mainly focused on easing financing constraints or intensifying industry competition to explain mechanisms,lacking analysis of other channels such as factor endowment structures and technology spillover.Second,the measurement of innovation relies on patent applications and lacks detailed analysis,especially the analysis of heterogeneous innovation paths.This study establishes an extended theoretical framework of heterogeneous firms,revealing the cost-saving effect,human capital matching effect,technology spillover effect,and industry competition effect.Using micro-level firm data and patent database from 2011 to 2014,we develop a citation network analysis approach to identify firms'innovation paths to empirically examine the effects of digital finance.Digital finance significantly improves the quantity and quality of manufacturing innovation through a positive cost-saving effect,human capital matching effect,technology spillover effect,and negative industry competition effect.Moreover,the impact of digital finance on manufacturing firms'innovation is moderated by innovation efficiency.Further,digital finance has a significant positive effect on the resource allocation efficiency of industry innovation factors and decreases the dispersion of innovation efficiency in the industry through the resource reallocation effect.Furthermore,digital finance impacts manufacturing firms'selection of innovation paths.Firms exhibit differentiated preferences over incremental versus breakthrough innovation depending on their labor productivity and innovation efficiency attributes.Specifically,firms with high labor productivity and low innovation efficiency tend to opt for incremental innovation;firms with low labor productivity and high innovation efficiency lean toward breakthrough innovation;"dual-high"firms prefer a mixed approach of both incremental and breakthrough innovation;and"dual-low"firms tend not to engage in innovative activities.The main contributions of this study are as follows.First,it enriches the theoretical analysis of how digital finance affects corporate innovation by considering heterogeneous cost structures and asymmetric technology spillovers.It provides a direct research foundation of how external environment optimization can facilitate corporate digital transformation.Second,we improve the measurement of innovation quality and path based on citation network analysis.We pioneer the measurement of innovation path proxies using Chinese microdata,offering a methodology for examining breakthrough innovation paths for high-quality growth.In addition,we provide micro-evidence that financial innovation promotes the transformation of the innovation path of the real economy,providing information for policy formulation.Overall,this study has reference value for financial industry model innovation to promote the path breakthrough of manufacturing industry innovation.
Digital FinanceInnovation PathResource AllocationInnovation Efficiency
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
