Impacts of High-Speed Rail Stations Opening on the Regional Innovation Level <br/>—Analysis Based on Scoring Tendency Matching Model

Abstract

In the background of the era of the "eight horizontal and eight vertical" high-speed rail (HSR), HSR has had a great impact on the location conditions of cities along the route, and the emergence of HSR compresses the "space-time" distance between regions, greatly promoting the flow of factors between regions. This paper analyzes the possible impact of HSR station opening on regional innovation level, tests the impact of HSR station opening on the level of urban innovation by combining the PSM model combined with panel data regression model, carries on the robustness test of the results with the tool variables, and further explores the impact of the influence on the heterogeneity of different characteristic cities. The study found that the opening of HSR stations has a significant positive impact on the improvement of regional innovation level in terms of average effect, but the cities with different locations have significant differences, and the level of urban innovation in the eastern and western regions where HSR stations are not set up is significantly higher than that of cities without HSR stations, while the impact on the eastern region is significantly greater than that of the western regions, but the opening of HSR stations has little impact on the level of urban innovation in the central and western regions, mainly because the eastern region has a good foundation for innovation, and the western region has a highly inclined support policy. This paper thinks that the government should further expand the construction of HSR network, and pay attention to the use of policy means to narrow the differences in the level of innovation between regions.

Booming with Speed: High-Speed Rail and Regional Green Innovation

“…e relative sizes of impact among four kinds of patents are the same as our baseline regression results. ese findings are consistent with those of Fan [12], who argues that it is mainly because the eastern region has a good foundation for innovation and the western region has a highly inclined support policy such as Low Carbon Pilot Policy, while central and northeastern regions possess neither of these two advantages and their innovation environment is weak. Meanwhile, the previous literature points out that with local green environmental regulation tightening, firms that have difficulties in carrying out green innovation R&D and reducing the pollutant emissions in the short term may choose to relocate to the region where the mandates are less stringent to avoid the high pollution abatement costs and maximize their profits [86,87].…”

“…"Invention" refers to new technical schemes for new products, new methods, or technology improvements, which represents the core technical achievements; "utility model" refers to a new technical solution for product shape or structure; "appearance design" refers to product's new appearance or pattern. Following Fan [12], we select invention patents and utility model patents to better reflect the regional innovation levels in this paper.…”

“…e mechanisms of HSR's effect on economic development have been richly studied, including network connectivity and spatial accessibility improvement [5], market expansion effect [6], industrial structure upgrading [7], industry agglomeration [8], technology spillovers (W. [9], production efficiency improvement [10], spatial equity improvement [11], and innovation [12].…”

Impact of high-speed rail opening on the efficiency of enterprise human capital investment: Evidence from China

“…In accordance with the literature, HSR opening is considered an exogenous shock in macroeconomic terms because it is an infrastructure project typically led and implemented by the government or railway-operating companies. Its initiation is usually driven by strategic government initiatives and policies rather than market or internal corporate decisions (Du and Peng, 2017;Fan, 2020;Wu et al, 2022). HSR opening is considered an exogenous variable implemented at the macroeconomic level and is suitable for the application of a multi-period DID model (Wu et al, 2022).…”

An Empirical Study with DID Model for the Impact of Lanzhou-Xinjiang HSR on Regional Economic Growth

“…As an important symbol of the rapid development of China today, high-speed rail (HSR) has become the most effective way to solve the problem of long-distance rapid transportation [2]. As the key nodes and hubs of timespace interaction between different cities in the region, HSR stations coordinate the flow of regional economic factors and have a great impact on the regional economic growth of the stations [4] [7]. The Lanzhou-Xinjiang high-speed railway (Lan-Xin HSR) is the longest HSR built at one time in the world.…”