Abstract: Based on the idea of ‘protectors benefit and polluters pay’ and the mechanism of rewards and punishment compensation, the policy of ecological compensation for air quality improvement aims to guide urban emission entities. Sofar, the research on the impact of air ecological compensation policy on green innovation is still at the infancystage. In view of the hysteresis, complexity and heterogeneity of the influencing mechanism, this paper selected 284 prefecture-level cities in Chinaas samples, and conducted empirical studies usingthe methods of Quantile Regression, mediating effect and moderating effect models, for the periodof 2006 to 2020. The results showed that: Firstly, the elasticity of green innovation efficiency on air ecological compensation policies was significantly positive. This positive effect would enhance with the increase of green innovation efficiency. Besides, most of the controlled variables (except for industrial structure and education level), including foreign direct investment, government expenditure, economic growth and moderate environmental regulations, promoted green innovation to certainextents. Secondly, regional competition played a partial mediating role in promoting green innovation by ecological compensation policies, while the growth of urban scale in cities with higher levels of aging actually suppressed the driving effect of ecological compensation on green innovation. Thirdly, there existed a ‘U’-shaped moderating effect of technological progress towards the driving mechanism of compensation policies on green innovation. Currently, the moderating effect of technological progress in the sampling cities was located in the left half of the ‘U’-shaped (i.e., the negative moderating of technological progress), indicating that with the continuous improvement of technological level, the positive effect of ecological compensation policies was decreasing. This research provided important empirical evidence for improving the effect of ecological compensation forair quality,controlling regional competition and city size, optimizing the allocation of green innovation resources.