A Study On The Resource Space Allocation Effect Of High-speed Railway Opening

The rise of new economic geography has led economic research to begin to pay attention to the impact of transportation development on resource space allocation.Highspeed railway is an important part of transportation infrastructure investment.The highspeed railway has accelerated the flow of production factors such as labor and capital,and has reshaped China's economic spatial layout.Therefore,it is particularly important and urgent to explore the impact of high-speed rail opening on the efficiency of the production factor in the process of spatial reshaping.This paper attempts to study the impact of highspeed railway on the allocation efficiency of resource from the perspectives of spatial distribution of the population,information flow of the capital market and urban total factor productivity,and enhances our understanding of high-speed railway.More,puting forward some policy recommendations about the high-speed railway construction planning for reference by relevant decision makers.Firstly,from the perspective of the factors influencing the resource space allocation and population mobility?information flow?resource allocation of the cities,the paper classifies the existing literature about the topic of high-speed railway,and summarizes the main conclusions and the deficiencies of the existing literature.Then,some basic theoretical research related to high-speed railway are analyzed,and we put forward the main research hypothesises of this paper.Finally,we use the difference-in-difference method and a series of robustness test to prove the above hypothesises.The empirical research in this paper is mainly carried out in the following three aspects:First,the opening of the high-speed railway not only reshapes the spatial allocation of production factors between regions,but also affects the distribution of factors within the city.Urban sprawl reflects the spatial distribution of urban population relative to urban land.Based on the continuous time difference-in-difference method,it is found that the opening of high-speed rail has aggravated the sprawl of the cities along the railway stations.Further research shows that the opening of high-speed rail mainly exacerbates the urban sprawl in the eastern and central regions,and has the most significant impact on the eastern cities;the impact of high-speed rail opening on urban sprawl in small and medium-sized cities is greater than that in large cities;the closer the city is to the province's capital,the more obvious the urban sprawl tends to be.A series of tests,such as propensity score matching and placebo,prove the robustness of the above conclusions.The mechanism analysis shows that the increase in house prices caused by the opening of high-speed rails and the expansion of roads are important reasons for the sprawl of cities.The empirical results show that under the intervention of “visible hand”,the high-speed rail will bring about problems such as the disorderly expansion of the cities,which will intensify the sprawl of the cities and reduce the land use efficiency.It is particularly important to restrict the “High-speed railway encirclement” and “High-speed railway new city” with administrative means,and to guide the distribution of the industry in the process of high-speed railway construction.Second,with the population,capital and other factors as the carrier,the high-speed railway has also accelerated the flow of information.Price is an important adjustment mechanism to guide the allocation of market resources.The lack of price information will seriously reduce the efficiency of resource allocation.Taking the stock market as an example,the quasi-natural experiment of high-speed railway construction was used to examine the impact of high-speed railway opening on the pricing efficiency of the capital market.We find that the opening of the high-speed railway significantly increased the stock price information of the listed companies,thereby improving the efficiency of resource allocation.The above conclusion is robust after a series of tests.After the analysis of its mechanism,we find that the opening of the high-speed railway significantly promoted the stock price information with higher information asymmetry and weak external supervision.As information asymmetry and regulatory costs are endogenous with the local policy environment,it is further found that the opening of high-speed railway has significantly increased the stock price information in areas with worse marketization and imperfect legal systems.These empirical results show that the opening of high-speed railway is conducive to promoting the release of capital market information and the reduction of regulatory costs,and also provides empirical evidence that the development of transportation infrastructure is beneficial for capital market development.Third,the opening of high-speed railway changed the layout of production factors between regions,urban total factor productivity reflects the efficiency of the allocation of labor and capital factors between cities.The results of the study show that the opening of high-speed railway has significantly increased the total factor productivity of cities along the railway stations.Further research finds that the opening of high-speed railway has a significant effect on the total factor productivity of the eastern and central cities,but has no significant effect on the total factor productivity of western cities.In addition,the effect for larger cities is higher than the small and medium-size cities.Propensity score matching,placebo test,etc.prove the robustness of the above conclusions.The regression results show that,on the whole,the opening of high-speed railway for non-central cities is a spillover effect rather than a siphon effect,which is conducive to the sustained and rapid development of non-central cities.However,due to few numbers of cities connected to the network of high-speed railway in the western region and the opening time is short,the positive spillover effect has not yet been reflected.In brief,the above results show that the opening of the high-speed railway is beneficial for the flow of information,effectively enhances the micro-resource distribution mechanism of the price,and improves the total factor productivity of the city in the process of resource space reallocation.However,the opening of the high-speed way also faces some challenges,such as inducing the expansion of population in the way of low-density and deteriorating the urban sprawl.Finally,we give the main conclusions of this paper,and put forward some relevant policy recommendations.At the same time,it comes up with some prospects for further reaseach.