The Secret of City Size and Innovation Output

This paper empirically tests the relationship between city size and innovation output using panel data of Chinese cities from 2008 to 2018. The empirical results show that city size has a significant positive impact on innovation output. Without considering control variables, there is a superliner relationship between city size and innovation output. In addition, this paper further discusses the mechanism by which city size affects innovation output. The empirical results show that the possible channels through which city scale affects innovation output are the aggregation of creative workers, the improvement of labor productivity, and the promotion of large-scale development of industrial enterprises