Research On The Influence And Mechanism Of Location Environment On Enterprise Production Efficiency

The New Economic Geography believes that the location environment is the core factor and spatial basis that affects the development of enterprises.The location environment affects enterprises with source effects and derivative effects,which have a heterogeneous impact on enterprises from the perspectives of cost,market,agglomeration,and talents.In the process of adapting to the location environment,enterprises also promote their own productivity(Guoping Wang,2019).In recent years,with the drastic changes in the world economic and political structure and the rapid popularization of a new round of technological and industrial revolution,our economy is facing a critical period of transformation.How to build a new pattern of economic development and seek new momentum for economic growth has become an urgent need and a breakthrough key issue.From the micro-perspective of an enterprise,effectively improving the independent innovation capability of the enterprise,improving the productivity of factor input is important to promote the smooth transformation of the economy.Existing research believes that the overall productivity of high-tech industries is on the rise,but the efficiency of technological progress and scale efficiency have declined.An important reason is that the unreasonable external location environment,especially the economic and policy environment,restricts the free flow of factors among enterprises and the spillover of knowledge(Huangbao Gui,2014).Therefore,it is significant to improve the production efficiency of enterprises by optimizing the spatial layout of the location and building a good economic and policy environment,so as to encourage enterprises to innovate and improve the efficiency of resource allocation.Is there a causal relationship between the optimization of enterprise location environment and its production efficiency? If so,what is the primary mechanism of impact? How to better promote enterprise innovation and improve production efficiency by optimizing the spatial layout of the location environment and other means?The solution of these problems provides a new perspective for excavating new kinetic energy of economic growth from the perspective of location environment and promoting high-quality economic development.Based on the above research background,this paper studies the impact of major locational factors,including transportation accessibility,consumption diversity,and housing costs,on the production efficiency of enterprises from a micro perspective.The main mechanism of location environment affecting production efficiency is verified from the perspectives of information exchange,labor quality,commuting time,and happiness.The conclusion provides a theoretical basis for the government to plan the spatial layout of urban functional areas and realize the dynamic complementarity of industrial agglomeration economy.Recently,domastic and foreign scholars have carried out rich researches on issues related to location environment and productivity.Few studies explore this issue from the microscopic perspective of enterprises within cities.Based on the rich urban-level rail transit data,consumption data and housing transaction data,this paper empirically verifies the causal relationship between the urban micro-location environment and the production efficiency of enterprises for the first time,and explores the heterogeneity and main mechanism of this impact.Based on the main conclusions,this paper puts forward scientific and reasonable suggestions for urban spatial planning and policy selection.This essay has important theoretical value and practical significance for optimizing the internal spatial distribution of cities and maintaining high-quality economic growth.Relevant literatures are reviewed and summarized mainly from four aspects: the measurement and influencing factors of enterprise production efficiency,the influence of surrounding traffic location environment on production efficiency,the influence of consumption diversity on production efficiency,and the influence of housing location environment on production efficiency.By sorting out the literature,it can be found that:first,the existing literature has relatively complete research on factors affecting the production efficiency of enterprises,but most of the literature only focuses on the influence of a single factor,ignoring the mutual influence between various factors and examine their overall impact on enterprise productivity;second,considering the related research on transportation accessibility,few literature pays attention to the impact of short-distance rail transit within the city on the production efficiency of enterprises;third,considering the consumption diversity,most researches are carried out from the meso-level between cities and regions,and few research studies on the impact of consumption diversity on production,especially from the perspective of people’s subjective initiative;fourth,there is a lack of research on the impact of housing costs on enterprise production efficiency at the micro level.Before processing data and conducting empirical research,this paper firstly analyzes the correlation between three main locational environmental factors,and constructs the basic theoretical framework of this research.The influence of a certain factor on the enterprise production efficiency is examined under the premise of controlling the other two factors.Based on this research framework,we then measures the enterprises production efficiency taking into account the characteristics of the micro-enterprise data used in this paper.In Chapter 3,we select appropriate methods for measuring enterprise productivity and make a preliminary calculation and comparison of the total factor productivity of Zhongguancun enterprises,which lays the foundation for further empirical research.While conducting empirical research,we mainly examine the impact of the enterprises surrounding location environment from the perspectives of transportation accessibility,consumption diversity and housing cost.In terms of transportation accessibility,based on the construction and opening data of the Beijing Subway,this paper empirically studies the impact of enterprises surrounding transportation accessibility on enterprises production efficiency and its impact mechanism.We found that enterprises surrounding transportation accessibility has a significant positive impact on its productivity.After using the distance from the enterprise to the nearest "minimum spanning tree" subway station as an instrumental variable,it is found that every 10% reduction in the distance between the enterprise and the nearest subway station drives the total factor productivity of the enterprise to increase by 0.83%.This empirical result remains robust after changing the calculation method of enterprise TFP,the measurement method of traffic accessibility,retaining only new parks,and considering the hysteresis of the impact.The results of the heterogeneity analysis show that the smaller,private and labor-intensive enterprises are more affected by the transportation accessibility,which may because the smaller the enterprise scale,the more flexible the operation mode,and the subway has a greater impact on enterprise productivity by improving the commuting efficiency of its employees and the quality of human capital in enterprises with higher labor intensity.Further,this paper also verifies the main micro-mechanism of this impact and finds that reducing the commute time of employees,promoting inter-enterprise communication,improving market accessibility and promoting the quality of human capital are the key influence mechanism.These conclusions are of certain guiding significance to strengthen the overall planning and integration of resources in order to carry out precise traffic spatial layout within the city and build a high-efficiency traffic network.In terms of consumption diversity,this paper mainly focuses on the driving effect of consumption diversity on production.Using catering diversity as a proxy variable for consumption diversity,and matching the catering store data of "Dianping.com" with the data of Zhongguancun high-tech enterprises,this paper empirically examines the impact of catering diversity on enterprise production efficiency.The main conclusions are as following: first,the catering diversity has a significant positive effect on the enterprises productivity,and after using the transaction area of the newly opened real estate around the enterprise as an instrumental variable,an increase of 1 standard deviation of the catering diversity within 1 km around the enterprise significantly increase the enterprise TFP by about 8.9%;secondly,the above-mentioned impact is stronger within non-state-owned enterprises,enterprises with more employees,labor and technology intensive enterprises,and enterprises in which employees face higher commuting costs;thirdly,this paper examines the micro-mechanism of above impact from the perspectives of consumption selection effect and work efficiency effect.The consumption selection effect means that the improvement of catering diversity around the enterprise can promote the quality of enterprises human capital.The work efficiency effect means that the catering diversity may improve the life and work satisfaction of employees,thus exerting a positive effect on theirwork efficiency.These conclusions have important policy value for the city government to explore the production potential of enterprises and improve the overall production efficiency by rationally planning the urban functional space layout.In terms of housing cost,based on the second-hand housing transaction data in Beijing,this paper uses the average transaction price of second-hand housing within a certain range around the enterprise as a proxy variable for housing cost,and empirically studies the impact of housing cost on enterprise productivity.The main foundings are as following.First,the average price per unit area of second-hand housing within 1 km around the enterprise has a significant negative impact on enterprise productivity.Using the product of slope of the residential area and last year real estate development land purchase area in Beijing as instrumental variable,it is found that for every 10% increase in the housing cost,the company’s TFP decreases by 8.9%.Second,by calculating and regressing the average housing cost in different distances around the company,we find that the impact of housing cost within 1.5 kilometers is biggest and most significant,and beyond the distance of 1.5 kilometers,housing cost impact weakens gradually.Third,through mechanism analysis,it is found that the cost of housing around the enterprise has a "crowding out effect" on enterprise innovation.The higher the housing cost,the less innovation input and output of the enterprise.In addition,the rising cost of housing around the company will also prolong the commute time of employees and reduce labor productivity.Fourth,enterprises with more employees,labor intensive companies,enterprises with longer commuting time,and service-sector businesses are more affected by changes in surrounding housing costs.This study further improves the related research on housing costs,and provides theoretical support for the government to scientifically formulate housing cost control policies to guide the healthy development of the economy.Based on the main conclusions of this paper,the marginal contributions and innovations of this paper are mainly reflected in the following aspects.First,the existing research on the location environment mainly focuses on the location selection of enterprises and the heterogeneous economic effects of the location environment between cities.However,few research has directly studied the impact of different types of locational environmental factors on production efficiency at the micro level.Drawing on existing research,this paper uses rail transit accessibility,catering diversity and average housing transaction price as proxy variables to measure the different characteristics of the location environment.For the first time,under the same framework,it systematically examines the effect of different types of location environment factors on enterprises production efficiency.It makes up for the research gap of environmental economic effects of location at the micro level.Second,although a large scale of studies have explored diverse factors that affect enterprises productivity from the perspectives of external environment,trade,market and internal environment,there are also some studies that have explored the relationship between work environment and employee work efficiency.However,few literatures study the impact of specific location space on the production efficiency of enterprises.Research directly examing the impact of enterprises surrounding environment on its production efficiency is still very rare.The research results of this paper enrich the related research on enterprise production efficiency from the perspective of location space characteristics,and provide a new perspective for explaining enterprise production efficiency and high-quality economic growth.Third,this research is carried out at the micro-level within the city.Compared with previous studies,which mostly analyze from the macro and mesoscopic levels of regions and cities,this paper uses the intra-city micro-enterprises,transportation,shops and housing databases,and the data are more timely and representative.Since the research objects of this paper are high-tech enterprises in Beijing,all enterprises are in the same economic and policy environment,which avoids the model endogeneity problem caused by unobservable factors between cities.More importantly,the relevant research conclusions have a clearer guiding value for urban governments to formulate planning policies to improve the quality of economic growth.Due to data limitations,this study can be improved in the following aspects:Firstly,This paper conducts empirical research on representative Zhongguancun enterprises in Beijing,which can effectively avoid the influence of unobservable institutions and policies at the city level on the estimation results.However,considering the particularity of Beijing and the fact that most enterprises in Zhongguancun are hightech enterprises,their technical level and production efficiency are relatively high,and the policy of Zhongguancun Park has accelerated the agglomeration and complementation of enterprises within and between industries,whether relevant research conclusions can be extended to other cities and other types of enterprises,especially small and medium-sized cities,remains to be discussed and further verified.Secondly,within the framework of this research,when discussing the influence of one location factor,it is necessary to control the other two factors.Due to the limitation of some database,the time span of this study is short,only the three-year data of 2015,2017 and 2018,and the sample size is small.Empirical results rely more on the heterogeneity of different locational characteristics within a city,and it is difficult to fully capture the dynamic effects of locational factors on enterprise productivity.In future research,the impact of location environment on enterprise production can be verified in a longer time latitude by collecting more relevant data at the micro level.Third,in the mechanism inspection part,although this paper has tried to analyze the mechanism of location environmental factors affecting enterprise production efficiency from various perspectives such as knowledge spillovers,human capital quality,and employee commuting,but due to the lack of individual-level micro-data,the micro-mechanism validation,especially with regard to the analysis of mechanisms at the individual level of employees,is still imprecise.In the future,it is hoped that more levels and types of individual-level micro-data can be collected through expert discussions,field research,etc.,in order to improve the above research limitations.