Does Industry–Finance Integration Promote Intelligent Manufacturing? Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment of China’s Industry–Finance Integration Pilot Program

In the digital economy, intelligent manufacturing has become a pivotal route for manufacturing firms to achieve high-quality development. A persistent challenge is how to channel financial resources toward the long-horizon, high-uncertainty investments required by intelligent manufacturing. From the perspective of finance serving the real economy, this paper exploits China’s Industry–Finance Integration Pilot Program as a quasi-natural experiment and evaluates its impact on firms’ intelligent manufacturing. Using firm- year observations of A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2010 to 2023, we implement a staggered difference-in-differences design with firm and year fixed effects and firm-level clustered standard errors. The results show that the pilot policy significantly increases firms’ intelligent manufacturing index constructed from the MD&A text of annual reports. Mechanism analyses suggest that the policy improves intelligent manufacturing by alleviating financing constraints and fostering technological innovation. Heterogeneity tests indicate stronger effects for firms facing more intense product-market competition, high-tech firms, and firms led by higher-ability managers. Extension analyses further show positive effects on sub-dimensions of intelligent manufacturing (AI, big data, Internet technologies, and value-chain intelligence) and that intelligent manufacturing improves total factor productivity. These findings provide micro-level evidence on how industry–finance integration promotes intelligent manufacturing, offering policy implications for scaling up pilot programs and supporting intelligent transformation and digital upgrading in manufacturing.