Does high-speed rail promote corporate green innovation?

ABSTRACT

This paper employs the difference-in-difference model (DID) to empirically investigate how high-speed rail affects the green innovation of corporate. We find that high-speed rail significantly promotes corporate green innovation, and the result differed between regions. The mechanism is that high-speed rail has increased the regional environmental awareness, corporate environmental costs, labour supply, and the firm’s external financial support, providing more innovation resources for enterprises.

KEYWORDS:

• High-speed rail
• Green innovation
• Environmental awareness
• DID

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We use regional pollution control cost divided by the secondary industry GDP to calculate environmental regulation intensity. When the intensity value in a region is greater than average, we categorize them as a strong environmental regulations region..

² We tested for group differences in Appendix C.

³ See Appendix B for specific models.

⁴ Due to the absence of relevant variables, there is a sample difference between the mechanism test and the main regression. To ensure the rationality of our results, we re-run the baseline regression within the sample of the mechanism test, as detailed in Appendix C.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the 2020 Graduate Education Innovation Plan of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, China [202110585].