How does regional education-technology-talent policy coordination shape corporate AI investment? Evidence from China

In the digital economy era, whether regional policy coordination can effectively promote corporate technology investment has become a critical question for innovation governance. This paper focuses on the synergy among education, science and technology (S&T), and talent policies at the city level and examines its effect on AI investment by Chinese listed companies. Using a dictionary co-occurrence method applied to prefecture-level government work reports, we construct an education-S&T-talent policy synergy index (ESTP) and match it with firm-level panel data. Two-way fixed effects and instrumental variable estimations consistently show that stronger cross-domain policy synergy significantly promotes corporate AI investment. The effect operates through two channels: enhancing firms' innovation talent absorption capacity and deepening their embeddedness in industry-university-research collaborative networks. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that non-state-owned enterprises are more responsive to policy synergy signals. Further analysis uncovers an inverted U-shaped relationship, suggesting that the returns to cross-departmental coordination diminish beyond an optimal range. These findings highlight that the promotional effect of regional policies on corporate AI investment depends not merely on the intensity of individual policy domains but critically on their mutual coordination, extending policy mix theory to cross-departmental synergy among education, S&T, and talent systems.