财经问题研究

提高财政资金使用绩效是用好财政政策的重要抓手，政府信息公开能够通过社会监督提高政府支出效率。本文基于2009—2021年中国地级市层面数据，采用多时点双重差分模型实证检验公共数据开放对政府支出效率的影响及作用机制。研究结果显示：公共数据开放能够提高政府支出效率；公共数据开放对政府支出效率的提高效应发生在政民互动程度低、行政壁垒低和数据开放水平高的地区；公共数据开放通过促进公共服务竞争、提高政府回应性和加强社会监督等路径提高政府支出效率；公共数据开放改善了城市内企业的外部环境，降低了企业的制度性交易成本，提高了城市创新活力。本文不仅丰富了公共数据开放与政府支出效率关系的相关研究，也为提高政府支出效率、保障财政可持续性和推动创新型国家建设提供了参考。

Enhancing government performance is central to modernizing local governance capacity and systems. In recent years, evaluations of government expenditure behavior and fiscal policy have increasingly emphasized expenditure efficiency. Further advancing government information disclosure can improve expenditure efficiency through public oversight. However, existing literature offers limited studies linking government information disclosure to expenditure efficiency, particularly from the perspective of open public data.This paper treats the rollout of municipal open data platforms across Chinese cities as a quasi-natural experiment. Employing city-level data and a difference-in-differences(DID) model, this paper finds that open public data significantly enhances local government expenditure efficiency. This effect is more pronounced in regions characterized by lower government-citizen interaction levels, lower administrative barriers, and higher data openness. Results remain robust after addressing endogeneity problems, model specification biases, and confounding policies. Mechanism analysis reveals that open data operates by strengthening internal and external audit scrutiny, fostering intergovernmental competition in public service provision(supply-side), and improving government responsiveness(demand-side). Further analysis shows that open data enhances urban innovation vitality by improving firms' external environments and reducing institutional transaction costs.The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, it fills a research gap in evaluating the impact of open public data, especially on government expenditure efficiency. In the digital era, this paper reveals how data empowers efficiency, offering new insights for modernizing national governance. Second, it systematically examines mechanisms linking open data to expenditure efficiency. While existing studies focus on fiscal pressure or central-local fiscal relations, this paper broadens the analytical lens to data openness. Third, it extends analysis to innovation, addressing the underexplored impact of open data on firms' external environments. By bridging macro-micro perspectives, it enriches urban innovation literature.This paper elucidates the logic through which open government data affects expenditure efficiency, providing policy references for enhancing fiscal sustainability and facilitating innovation-driven development. This paper argues that to enhance the efficiency of government expenditures, it is necessary to improve the public data management system, elevate the quality of government information disclosure, establish reasonable regulations for data resources, and refine the performance evaluation mechanisms for local governments.