Empirical testing and mechanism identification of panel data in urban construction
Xinyang He
Hainan Vocational University of Science and Technology
Hongwei Tao
Hainan Vocational University of Science and Technology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59429/esta.v12i3.11345
Keywords: financial development; inclusiveness; placebo test
Abstract
This study constructs a comprehensive index of regional development disparities based on city-level panel data and employs a fixed-effects model to examine the impact of digital finance development on regional gaps. Benchmark regression reveals that digital finance significantly narrows regional development disparities (with a coefficient of approximately −0.127 across the entire sample), exhibiting a stronger effect in less developed regions (approximately −0.231) and demonstrating pronounced inclusive characteristics. Robustness checks—Including dependent variable substitution (index reconstruction via PCA/TOPSIS), instrumental variables two-stage least squares (Kleibergen–Paap F≈15), and placebo tests with 500 random permutations—Consistently confirm the direction and significance of these findings. Mechanism identification reveals that optimized financing environments serve as the key mediating channel (accounting for approximately 38.6% of the mediating effect), while factors such as entrepreneurial activity, corporate innovation investment, and industrial structure upgrading significantly moderate the equilibrium effects of digital finance. This study provides data support and policy implications for narrowing regional disparities and enhancing factor allocation efficiency.
References
[1] Sustainability in e-commerce food shopping: an empirical study from the perspective of consumers[J].British Food Journal,2025,127(13):558-579.
[2] Investigating the nexus between business process management maturity and digital maturity: an empirical study of organizations in Poland[J].Business Process Management Journal,2025,31(5):1663-1683.
[3] Imran M ,Cortellessa V ,Ruscio D D , et al.Is code coverage of performance tests related to source code features? An empirical study on open-source Java systems[J].Empirical Software Engineering,2025,30(6):157-157.
[4] Wang X ,Ou D ,Shu C , et al.How Can We Achieve Carbon Neutrality During Urban Expansion? An Empirical Study from Qionglai City, China[J].Land,2025,14(8):1689-1689.