| ‘To be rich,to build roads first'.Transport infrastructure built to decrease trade cost plays an important role in economic and social development.On 1st August 2008,the first line of 350 km/h--the Beijing-Tianjin inter-city railway was operated,since then China's high-speed rail(HSR)has experienced rapid development in the following decade.According to the international standards and China's new standards of HSR,at of the end of 2016,China's HSR mileage reached 23,000 kilometers,covering 53%of the country's cities,exceeding the world's 60%,ranking at the 1st in the world.The rapid development of China's HSR has greatly improved the domestic transportation network and speeding up the economic development.Although numbers of studies have shown that transportation infrastructure promotes export by reducing the variable trade costs of goods logistics,less attention is paid the impact of fixed trade costs of the improvement of personnel flow efficiency.With the advancement of trade liberalization and the development of the Internet,the barriers to trade in tariff barriers and trade exchanges are weakening,while acquiring the complex information in trade,such as understanding of the market,establishment of supplier network relationships,and the efficient communication at the time of port customs clearance,plays an increasingly important role.The acquisition of such complex information often depends on face-to-face communication.As a passenger dedicated line,HSR has the function of compressing time and space,which can change the space-time constraints caused by geographical distance,greatly facilitating the spatial flow of personnel,and providing an insight into the impact of trade cost reduction on firm export.Besides,since the reform and opening up,China's foreign trade has also achieved rapid development in the past 40 years.From the perspective of trade volume,the count of China's total import and export trade in the world increased from 0.77%in 1978 to 11.48%in 2017,ranking at the 1st in the world.And China has achieved the transition from a"small trade country"to a"big trade country".In terms of the types of trade products,we have successively achieved the transformation from primary products to industrial products,from textile products to electromechanical products.Moreover,China's exports of high-tech products represented by electronics and information technology have continued to expand since entering the new century.However,a considerable number of export products in China are still concentrated in the low value-added field,and are still in the low-end segment of the global industrial chain.And,Asia has always been a major destination for Chinese exports.Based on the rapid development of China's HSR and the increasingly important role of face-to-face communication costs in trade,exploring the impact of HSR on firm export from the theoretical and empirical aspects has strong theoretical and practical significance.From the perspective of trade cost changes,we examine the impact of China's HSR on firm export and its underlying mechanism.The research results will provide significant insights for optimizing the construction of HSR,improving the rationality of firm location selection,and enhancing regional economic development.This paper regards the HSR initiated by China in 2008 as a quasi natural experiment,and examines its impact on firm export basing on the perspective of trade cost changes.First,through theoretical analysis,on the one hand,HSR as a passenger dedicated line may promote the flow of high-skilled personnel,improve the matching efficiency between enterprises,and then reduce the fixed trade costs to promote firm export;on the other hand,HSR as an important component of the transportation network,it is possible to reduce the cost of variable trade by releasing freight transport capacity.Second,using firm-level data,this paper empirically tests the impact of HSR opening on firm exports.Minimum spanning tree is used as an instrument to solve the endogeneity problem,event analysis method is used to verify the parallel hypothesis,and various robustness tests are used to increase the reliability and robustness of the empirical results.Third,by analyzing the passenger and freight conditions of various modes of transportation,we access the impact of HSR on variable trade costs;while by empirically testing the impact of China's HSR on employment and floating population in different industries,and introducing the Market Access proposed by Donaldson&Hornbeck(2016),the fixed trade cost changes caused by HSR is measured according to Lin(2017)to explain the impact of HSR on fixed trade costs.Finally,a series of heterogenous analysis is performed to verify the mechanism of HSR'export effect.There are seven chapters in this paper.The first chapter is the introduction,which consists of the research background,the purpose of this study,our research idea and concrete method being adopted,and innovation points.The second chapter is a literature review,we summarize the literatures closely related to the research content of this paper,including research on transportation infrastructure and trade,HSR and trade costs,and trade costs and exports,focusing on the economic effects of HSR.Finally,based on the previous literatures,we propose the research direction and research value of this paper.The third chapter is the mechanism analysis of China's HSR on trade.By introducing the development of HSR network and HSR's advantages and disadvantages,combining with the previous literatures about the labor force flow,enterprise outsourcing and freight cost,we propose the potential mechanism of HSR to influence the firm export of enterprises by changing the variable trade cost and fixed trade cost.The forth chapter is empirical analysis on China's HSR on enterprises'export.The connection to HSR network for each city is being regarded as quasi-natural experiment and exogenous shocks,and using 2000-2011 China's custom data,China's industry business performance data,HSR data and prefecture city data,by the identification strategy of DID,event study,IV,PPML,Truncreg mode,placebo test,different sub-samples and independent sample to conduct robustness checks.The fifth chapter examines the underlying mechanism of the impact of China's HSR on firm export.Through theoretical analysis,we find that HSR might enchance firm export by reducing trade costs in the following two aspects:on the one hand,HSR facilitates the communication efficiency of high-skilled labor and strengthens the matching efficiency between enterprises.Exports are promoted by increasing firm outsourcing and reducing intrinsic trade costs.On the other hand,as an important part of the transportation network,HSR may help release goods by reducing the variable trade costs by releasing cargo transportation capacity such as railways and highways.We assesse the variable trade cost changes brought by HSR by statistically analyzing the freight and passenger traffic conditions of various modes of transportation,empirically testing the impact of HSR on passenger and freight transport.Then by empirically testing the impact of HSR on employment and migration of different groups,and constructing the“market access”indicator,we measure the fixed trade cost changes brought by HSR.The sixth chapter shows a further study on enterprises'export intensive and extensive,industry's heterogeneity,products'heterogeneity,regions'heterogeneity and HSR station's choice.The final chapter is summary and policy recommendations.Based on literature review,mechanism analysis and empirical analysis,the main conclusions of this paper are as follows.(1)Based on the previous literature and the inter-enterprise trade model,we constructed a simple model to theoretically explore the impact of HSR opening on firm export.This paper finds that on the one hand,HSR can strengthen inter-firm linkages by promoting high-skilled labor mobility,and promote firm export by reducing fixed trade costs;on the other hand,HSR is an important part of transportation networks,and it could release freight by traditional railway and expressway,which in turn reduces variable trade costs and promotes firm export.The mechanism is verified in the following with the fact facts and empirical tests.(2)China's HSR significantly promote enterprises'export,the margin effect is 12.7%.The robustness checks including alterative index of firm export,PPML method,Truncreg model,start construction data,alterative index of productivity and different time subsample,and all the regression results remain robust.Furtherly,refer to Faber(2014),we constructed least cost spanning tree network serving as HSR's instrument variable to tackle with the endogeneity from HSR's nonrandom placement,and the result is in line with our baseline result.(3)After controlling the urban fixed effect and time fixed effect,the empirical results show that the impact of China's HSR opening on freight volume is not significant,that is,the HSR has not produced significant release of other modes of transport.Then the impact of HSR opening on different groups of people was analyzed by empirical methods.It was shown that the opening of China's HSR significantly promoted the employment of low-skilled labor in the construction industry,but strengthened the accumulation of high-skilled labor in the financial industry to central cities;the floating population and high years of education have benefited more from the opening of HSR,suggesting that HSR mainly affects the export of enterprises by affecting the flow of highly skilled labor.In order to assess the effect of HSR on personnel turnover,the“market access”indicator,as described in Donaldson&Hornbeck(2016),was constructed as a proxy variable for personnel exchange costs to assess changes in fixed trade costs.The results show that the opening of HSR has significantly increased urban market access,which significantly reduces the cost of communication between people in different cities.(4)The results of the binary marginal analysis of further firm export show that the HSR promotes the marginal increase of the enterprise's export expansion;the mechanism is verified from the perspectives of industry factor intensity,product time sensitivity,regional heterogeneity,and HSR station location.The opening of export-oriented enterprises in capital or technology-intensive industries,time-sensitive products,eastern regions and HSR direct ports show larger effect.The export effect of HSR is within the distance of 30km between the HSR station away from the center of the city.Based on the analysis of the heterogeneous trade theory framework of enterprises,it is found that non-state-owned enterprises,domestic-funded enterprises and incumbent enterprises can benefit from the decline of trade costs brought by HSR,and thus promote enterprise exports.From a perspective of trade cost,this paper systematically studied the influence of China's HSR on enterprises'export and its underlying mechanism.The innovations of this paper are as follows:(1)Providing a new research perspective for China's HSR economic effects assessment.This paper is the first in China to pay attention to the impact of China's HSR on firm export.After controlling the characteristics of enterprises,cities,and provinces and industries,we found that the opening of China's HSR has significantly promoted firm export and expanded existing research on HSR.(2)Providing a new method of causal identification for the impact of HSR construction.This paper draws on Faber's(2014)logic for building instrument variable for highways,using hydrological,terrain,and undulating geographic information data to construct the"Least Cost Path Spanning Tree Networks"as an instrument variable to solve endogenous problems and identify causal relationships between HSR and corporate exports.(3)Providing a new mechanism analysis for HSR to influence firm export.Based on the analysis of theoretical mechanism,this paper refers to Donaldson&Hornbeck(2016)and Lin(2017),constructs and calculates the“market access”indicator as a proxy variable for fixed trade costs,and explores the mechanism of HSR's effect on firm export.It was found that the opening of HSR significantly improved the market access of the city,reduced the face-to-face communication cost of people,facilitated the information exchange between the enterprise's information search and the establishment of supply relations,and reduced the fixed trade cost of the enterprise's exports.HSR opening mainly promotes the expansion margin of corporate exports.The research results of this paper provide valuable clues for the construction of HSR and the optimization and upgrading of firm export strategy.(1)The construction of HSR.In this paper,although we detect the positive effect of HSR on firm export,HSR has led to the people migration from the peripheral cities to the central ones in the service industry,the financial industry,and the research and development industry,and increased the income gap between different groups of people,enhancing the income imbalance in China.According to the"Nineteenth National Congress"report in 2017,it was pointed out that the main contradiction in our society has been turned into"the contradiction between the people's growing needs for a better life and the development of inadequate imbalances."In this context,HSR construction is not an effective policy to reduce regional development imbalances.Thus,it is important to objectively evaluate the economic effect of HSR,especially in the less developed western areas.(2)The transformation of firm export structure.In 1995-2005,China's export growth was mainly achieved in the intensive margin,but not the extensive margin.In this paper,we find that the opening of HSR significantly promotes the extensive margin of enterprise exports by reducing the fixed trade cost,providing important clues for the transformation of China's enterprise export structure.(3)Firm location selection.This paper finds that the effective distance of HSR on firm export is within 30km from the HSR station to city center.However,due to political,security and construction problems,HSR planners have limited choices for the location of HSR station.Therefore,in the face of changes in transportation infrastructure conditions,the adjustment of firm location with the development of regional transportation infrastructure is an effective optimization and improvement direction for enterprises to export.This paper provides a theoretical basis for the transformation of the“striving road”from the various regions in the real world to the hot topic of HSR selection.(4)The coordinated development of different types of transportation infrastructure.The composition of modern transportation network is far more complicated than the setting of this paper.There are complicated correlations between various types of traffic and different transportation objects.The analysis of this paper finds that the opening of HSR significantly affects railway passenger transport,and has a significant negative impact on passenger transport in civil aviation.But there is no significant impact on the impact of HSR on freight transport.Therefore,to fully mobilize the economic effect potential of the transportation network will put higher requirements on the overall planning and comprehensive management of the modern transportation network.In a word,the research results in this paper not only expand the research on the transportation infrastructure to affect trade through changing trade costs,but also enrich and expand the research on transportation infrastructure and trade to a certain extent,providing important theoretical support and basis for optimizing HSR construction. |
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