Relationship Between Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration Construction and Enterprise Innovation: Based on Geographic Regression Discontinuity Design

The construction of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration is the comprehensive product of the regional economic situation and administrative planning. This paper uses a quasi-experimental method, geographic regression discontinuity design (GRDD), to evaluate the actual effect of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration construction across administrative divisions on micro enterprise innovation, by taking the impact of “spatial layout” and “policy events” into account. The shortest distances from each enterprise’s location to the boundary of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration calculated by ArcGIS are considered the running variable, and the actual effect can be identified by the probability of receiving treatment jumps discontinuously at the known cutoff. It is found that the construction of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration can significantly improve the enterprise innovation, and this outcome is verified by rigorous robustness tests including the placebo test with pseudo-boundary/pseudo-time, the bandwidth sensitivity test, the parametric test with different functional forms, and the extreme value test. This study provides a beneficial supplement for China’s location-oriented policy evaluation and a solid micro-foundation for how to promote “high-quality development” in the new era.