Does “Smart City” Policy Promote Urban Innovation?

The construction of “smart city” is a new urbanization development mode that promotes intensive, intelligent, green and low carbon, aiming at enhancing the innovation capability of the city and further promoting the high integration of industrialization, urbanization and informatization. Based on the panel data of 279 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2015, this paper uses PSM-DID method to comprehensively investigate the impact characteristics and mechanism of “smart city” construction on urban innovation capability. The main conclusions are as follows: First of all, the construction of “smart city” can significantly promote the city’s innovation capability. Secondly, mechanism analysis shows that the construction of “smart city” can effectively promote economic agglomeration and promote the level of urban informatization construction, thus enhancing the innovation capability of the city. Finally, the analysis of urban heterogeneity shows that in cities with high level of human capital, high intensity of scientific and technological financial expenditure and high level of financial development, smart city construction has a more significant effect on improving urban innovation capability.