The effects of digital financial inclusion on innovation and entrepreneurship: A network perspective

The development of urban digital inclusive finance has a complex network connection, and the characteristics of this network affect urban innovation and entrepreneurship. By using 287 cities from 2015 to 2019 in China, this paper constructs the network of Chinese digital inclusive finance, extracting two typical network characteristics. And it further studies the impact of the two network characteristics on innovation and entrepreneurship in various cities. The empirical results show that: first, the network centrality characteristics of digital inclusive finance have a significant promoting effect on urban innovation and entrepreneurship; second, the impact of the network centrality characteristics of digital inclusive finance is related to the speed of industrial structure transformation, but the impact mechanism is related to the node number instead of the node strength; third, the impact of the network centrality characteristics on innovation and entrepreneurship exists heterogeneity among cities and the moderately developed cities have the largest impact.