A Study On The Impact Of Fintech On Corporate Innovation

In recent years,with the rapid development of emerging technologies,fintech has seen explosive growth.However,a related question arises-can the new financial service models created by fintech help the real economy solve its financing problems and thus promote business innovation? Some studies show that fintech not only expands the coverage of traditional financial institutions through modern technology,but also creates a series of new credit intermediaries focusing on micro and small finance,such as Wezuo Bank and Ali Microfinance,whose inclusive nature enables more enterprises to access more convenient and secure financial products and services,and also supports MSME loans more effectively.Based on this,in order to clarify how fintech affects the development of enterprise innovation activities,and thus give corresponding policy recommendations and insights to the government,enterprises,and financial institutions.In this paper,the number of patent applications is used as an indicator to measure the innovation output of enterprises.By filtering the keywords related to financial technology,this paper innovatively uses "prefecture-level city or municipality directly under the central government + financial technology keywords" as the search term.The number of results was obtained in the advanced search of Baidu News and used to measure the degree of regional fintech development.After the empirical analysis,it was concluded that the development of Fin Tech is a clear driver of business innovation.In terms of economic importance,each percentage point increase in the development of Fin Tech in the city is associated with an average increase of about 0.16 in the number of patent applications for the corresponding firms.The level of fintech development in a city is a macro factor that generally has a small impact on firm innovation performance,but the results are still biased due to factors such as missing data and measurement error in the study that can cause endogeneity problems.Therefore,the instrumental variable used to test endogeneity in this paper is the average of the level of fintech development in neighboring cities,and the results are consistent with the above.Then,a mechanism test is conducted,and the results find that Fin Tech can be a powerful driving force to alleviate corporate financing constraints and improve the effectiveness of government fiscal incentives,which also proves that the relevant hypotheses proposed in this paper are valid.In addition,this paper introduces factors such as region and industry into the empirical study,and through heterogeneity analysis of the sample,it is found that fintech can be more effective in promoting innovative activities of enterprises in eastern regions and high-tech industries.Finally,this paper conducts robustness tests from three perspectives: replacing the explanatory variables,using different regression models,and excluding enterprises with zero patent applications in the sample period,and the results are consistent with the previous paper.Thus,in the context of China’s high-quality economic development,the continuous promotion of financial technology and the transformation of the ecological structure of the financial industry have brought unlimited innovative power to the real economy,thus promoting the development of an innovative country.