High-speed railways and collaborative innovation

By Douglas Hanley, Jiancheng Li, Mingqin Wu. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2021

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper investigates the impact of infrastructure on innovation collaboration between enterprises in different locations using the introduction of high-speed railways in China. Applying an instrumental variable approach to control for the endogeneity of high-speed railways, and using a large enterprise census that includes both manufacturing and service sectors in China, we find that high-speed railways can improve innovation collaboration substantially at the city level. More importantly, we match city pairs based on high-speed railway routes and calculate the amount of time saved by a high-speed railway for each city pair. The empirical results suggest that the innovation collaboration also increases significantly at the city-pair level. Innovation quality, measured by patent citations between cities, also increases. Further evidence on spatial heterogeneity, industry heterogeneity and ownership heterogeneity suggests that the impact of high-speed railways is more significant for collaboration in less developed regions, in the service sector and in domestic enterprises.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4be113ff073e664b80905e0017cf8cbff89dbf8