Haoran YANG, East China normal university, China
Jingyang LIU, Suzhou university, China
Abstract:
The wide effects of high-speed railway (HSR) have long been the interest of academia and policy makers. China’s HSR networks have dramatically expanded since 2007, which is believed to have promoted development of the economy. While GDP per capita in 2018 have tripled of that in 2007. This paper employs two types of wealth—income wealth and financial wealth—to study how transportation infrastructure affects wealth distribution. We use data of 289 cities spreading from 2003 to 2018 as a quasi-experiment. On the basis of a time-varying difference-in difference approach, we find that the establishment of HSR stations exerts significant positive effects on inner-city income wealth and negative effects on inner-city financial wealth. There are marginal negative effects on average income at inner-city level. While no statistically significant causal effects appear at the entire scale city level either on income wealth or on financial wealth. In addition, cross-region analysis suggests heterogeneous effects on wealth growth. By dividing the sample into East, West and Central parts, this study finds HSRs leave positive effects on income wealth and negative effects on financial wealth in Central parts. But it has no significant effects on other regions. We do not observe significant effects when we analyze different groups of cities divided by economic growth. It concludes that the establishment of HSR put positive effects on wages increase but subtract financial wealth in inner-cities, especially in the central part of China.
Mots clés : High-speed railway|Income wealth|Financial wealth
A102431jl