Abstract: Due to the high attention to the risk of local government debt, there are more and more research on the influence factors of local government debt scale in recent years. Differing from analyzing the influence factors of provincial or prefecture level municipal governments from a single level perspective, this paper selects 285 prefecture level cities in 26 provinces and autonomous prefectures of China from 2011 to 2017 as the research object, and analyzes the influence factors of provincial government on the debt scale of prefecture level cities from the perspective of cross level influence.The results show that: at the provincial level, provincial government fiscal deficit and government competition will reduce the debt scale of prefecture level municipal government, fiscal transfer payment will increase the debt scale of prefecture level city, government promotion incentive and debt limit have no significant impact on the debt scale of prefecture level municipal government; at the municipal government level, fiscal deficit, government competition and promotion incentives significantly promote the debt scale of local governments.

Key words: urban investment bonds, multi-level government, cross level influence;Hierarchical Linear Model