Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Against the backdrop of China's transition from policy-based opening to institutional opening, how to effectively release the dividends of institutional opening and enhance regional entrepreneurial activity has become a focal issue for building high-level openness and achieving high-quality economic development. This study employs the establishment of Cross-Border E-Commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zones (CBEC zones) as a quasi-natural experiment and adopts a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) approach to empirically investigate the causal relationship between CBEC zone construction and regional entrepreneurial activity. The results demonstrate that the establishment of CBEC zones significantly enhances regional entrepreneurial activity, and this conclusion remains robust after a series of robustness tests. Mechanism analysis reveals that CBEC zones primarily promote regional entrepreneurial vitality through institutional innovation policies that generate digital talent agglomeration effects, fiscal pressure alleviation effects, and new-type digital infrastructure development effects. Further heterogeneity analysis indicates that CBEC zones predominantly enhance entrepreneurial vitality in eastern regions and among non-state-owned enterprises. These findings provide empirical evidence for optimizing institutional opening policies and constructing the new development paradigm.</p>