LAUSR

Despite the extensive use of demonstration projects, doubts remain on their effectiveness in promoting the commercialization of emerging technologies. To explore whether public demonstrations could stimulate innovation diffusion and to what extent the effects are, this paper conducted an empirical analysis of China's high-profile electric vehicle demonstration project based on a manually collected data set of 44 pilot cities from 2009 to 2015. The approach of difference-in-differences propensity score matching was used to address the selection bias of pilot cities, and the effects of demonstrating electric buses and electric commercial vehicles were further examined and discussed after a series of robustness check. The empirical results reveal that when controlling the impact of all policy incentives, the deployment of electric vehicles in the public sector has significantly stimulated the purchase of electric vehicles by individuals, especially in the pilot cities with more commercial vehicles, which provides new insights into the formulation of public procurement policies.