Title: Catching the Wind—Transportation and Knowledge Spillover: Evidence from China’s High-Speed Railway Network

Speaker: Siwei Cao, Beijing Normal University

Time: November 9th, 2020, 13:30-15:00

Venue: 106B, Zhonghui Building

Abstract:

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the construction of China’s High-Speed Railway (HSR) system to estimate the effect of reduction in transportation costs on the extent of geographical localization of knowledge spillovers in China. We show that connection to the HSR network leads to a 1.7% increase in spillover from a patent to a city in a year. The marginal benefit increases with distance, with cities located within 200km receiving no additional spillover and cities located farther than 1400km experiencing the largest increase (5.1%). The extent of increase in generating spillover due to HSR is larger for corporate patents than for university patents, larger for non-star patents than for star patents, larger for less innovative entities than for more innovative entities and manifested more though increase in inter-technology rather than intra-technology citations. In addition, the extent of increase in capturing spillover due to HSR is larger for peripheral cities than for metropolitan centers and within peripheral cities, larger for more innovative entities than for less innovative entities. Both spillovers from university to corporates and from corporates to universities are significantly improved due to HSR and their magnitudes are at a comparable level to that among corporates alone. Peripheral cities experience significant improvement in innovation performance as measured by citation-weighted patents, possibly through the channel of enhanced spillover due to HSR. Thus, the construction of High-Speed Railway significantly alleviates regional disparity in knowledge accumulation and contributes to innovation performance.