Does land mortgage financing spur urban economic development? A fresh insight from spatial spillovers

This empirical study explores the relationship between land mortgage financing and urban economic development from the perspective of spatial spillovers. We develop a spatial Durbin model (SDM) using a dataset for 83 Chinese cities over the period 2007-2015, and find that land mortgage financing not only promotes local economic development, but also has a positive spatial spillover effect on economic development in other cities. Urban fixed assets investment plays a partial mediation role. However, compared with that of other cities, this positive spatial spillover is significantly weaker for the economic development of megacities and industrial cities.