Abstract: Digital economy has become the“accelerator”of China’s economic development. Whether or not it can narrow income gap is an issue that calls for attention in China’s development. If the advance of digital technology is skill-biased, then the development of digital economy will have the same characteristic, thus affecting income gap. The quantile regression model of Recentered Influence Functions (RIF) is employed here to study the influence of digital economy on income gap. The research data comes from the comprehensive indicators of urban digital economy based on Enterprise Research Data: Special Database of Digital Economy Sector and the individual microscopic data of China Labor-force Dynamic Survey (CLDS). The findings are as follows: (1) The development of digital economy in China has widened income gap on the whole. (2) The digital economy increases the skill premium of middle and high skilled workers and widens the income gap through skill-biased technological progress. (3) The skill-biased feature of digital economy does not have a significant influence on the low-income group, if not in favor of the low-skilled labor force. (4) The digital economy has a greater influence on women, rural residents and people engaged in capital-intensive sectors with a more obvious skill-biased tendency.

Key words: digital economy, skill-biased technological progress, income gap, RIF regression