Abstract: There are many cities in the world which have realized cluster development in their financial industry, thus their competitiveness has been effectively improved. In order to popularize this kind of development mode throughout China, this paper takes the core-periphery model and the social embeddedness theory as the basis for theoretical analysis and subsequently infers the factors influencing the cluster development of financial industry. Meanwhile, considering the spatial difference factors in different regions, it conducts an empirical study of the panel data from 35 large and medium cities in China. The results indicate that such factors as the proportion of financial industry output value in GDP, average wage of employees, regional GDP per capita, industry output level, commercial sale level, financial expenditure level, educational input level, location in the eastern region and so on in one city have positive effects on the cluster development of the financial industry in the city, while household savings level has negative effect. Therefore, the cities in the eastern, central and western regions should adopt different cluster development types for their financial industries. They should develop the multicomponent financial organization system and extend the scale and range of operation, so as to gain the faster and better growth speed. The governments should strengthen their policy guidance and support to the cluster development of urban financial industries, create favorable cultural environment, improve the business quality of the employees, and foster and attract excellent talents for the financial construction.

Key words: financial industrial clusters; core-periphery model; city attachment; social embeddedness