Green Infrastructure Investment and Urban Industrial Chain Resilience: Evidence from Chinese Prefecture-Level Cities

Against the background of global production-network restructuring, low-carbon transition, and rising external uncertainty, this study examines the effect of green infrastructure investment on urban industrial chain resilience. Using panel data for 285 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2012 to 2024, industrial chain resilience is measured from the dimensions of industrial diversification and urban innovation capacity. Double machine learning is employed for baseline estimation, supplemented by mediation analysis, threshold regression, spatial econometric analysis, and a series of robustness tests. The results show that green infrastructure investment significantly enhances industrial chain resilience, and the finding remains robust to alternative model specifications, cross-fitting settings, generalized propensity score weighting, continuous-treatment entropy balancing, winsorization, and the exclusion of pandemic-period observations. Resource allocation efficiency plays a partial mediating role in this relationship. The threshold analysis identifies a significant nonlinear effect associated with energy consumption intensity, with the positive effect of green infrastructure investment being stronger below the estimated threshold and weakening above it. Spatial analysis further shows significant spatial dependence in both green infrastructure investment and industrial chain resilience, together with positive spillover effects on neighboring cities. These findings highlight the importance of improving green infrastructure investment efficiency, strengthening factor allocation, and promoting regional coordination in enhancing urban industrial chain resilience.