High-speed Railway And Financial Constraints？

Infrastructure construction has always been the main artery of national economic development.As an important infrastructure construction in China’s transportation field,high-speed railway has gradually became one of the most important vehicles in people’s daily travel.The gradual improvement of the high-speed railway network not only makes the information exchange between different regions and different economic subjects more convenient and smooth,but also further speeds up the circulation of human,financial,material and other resources in different geographical regions,which has a positive and important impact on the development of the economy.However,the problem of financial constraints has become one of the important bottlenecks restricting economic transformation and upgrading.In the imperfect market,because of the existence of information asymmetry and transaction cost,the cost of different financing methods is different,which leads to financial constraints,and has a negative impact on the business performance and long-term development of enterprises.Therefore,how to alleviate the financial constraints of enterprises has attracted more and more attention from the theoretical and practical circles.From the perspective of information asymmetry,we investigate the impact of highspeed railway on financial constraints and the underlying mechanism on the date of China’s A-share listed enterprises during 2009-2017 period.It is found that the opening of highspeed railway brings convenience for information acquisition and supervision,increases information transparency and eases financial constraints;Compared to state-owned enterprises and larger enterprises,the opening of high-speed railway to non-state-owned enterprises and smaller enterprises can be more capable of alleviating enterprises’ financial constraints.Furthermore,the opening of high-speed railway has a more obvious impact on the financial constraints in economically underdeveloped cities and cities farther away from the capital and central city.The result shows that the information effect caused by the opening of high-speed railway is the main reason to ease the financial constraints.To sum up,this paper finds that high-speed railway helps to reduce the cost of information search and supervision,and eases financial constraints.At the same time,it provides the micro evidence of the impact of major infrastructure construction(high-speed railway)on the allocation of resources in the capital market,which has a great reference significance for the government departments and investors.