Summary:
China has made remarkable progress in high-speed railway construction over the past decade, and it now ranks first in the world in terms of total mileage. Compared with other modes of transportation, high-speed railway has many advantages, being faster, safer, and more environmentally friendly. However, little attention is paid to its effect on the capital market. As a core concept in corporate finance, the cost of equity capital has always been of interest to researchers. At the micro level, this cost is an important criterion for the selection and performance evaluation of investment and financing projects and is vital for financial and business decisions. At the macro level, it plays an important role in efficient resource allocation and capital flow, and is an important indicator of the development of the capital market and the construction of relevant institutions (Mao et al., 2012). Therefore, understanding the spatiotemporal constraint effect of high-speed railway on the cost of equity capital will provide useful insights into the operation of the capital market, corporate investment, financing decisions, and performance evaluation. Taking China's A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2018 as a sample, this paper empirically investigates whether the opening of a high-speed rail has an impact on the equity capital cost of local listed companies. If so, is the impact different according to the companies' characteristics？ What are the specific paths by which the opening of a high-speed rail affects the cost of equity capital？ The results show that the cost of equity capital decreases significantly after the high-speed rail opens near the listed companies due to the reduction in internal and external information asymmetry. This phenomenon is affected by a series of company characteristics.The more distant the company is from the majority of investors, and the higher the company's business complexity is, the more the cost of equity capital is affected by the opening of the high-speed rail. Subsequently, we find that the improved company stock liquidity and information disclosure quality after the opening of a high-speed rail both affect the cost of equity capital. A series of robustness checks, including placebo tests, a two-stage regression, and propensity score matching, confirm the results of this paper. The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, it systematically investigates the impact of high-speed railway on the cost of equity capital, which improves our understanding of the spillover effect of high-speed rail operations and provides micro-enterprise evidence of the economic consequences of high-speed railway in China. Second, this paper investigates the effect of high-speed railway on the cost of equity capital, and then examines the channels of influence, enriching research on companies' cost of equity capital. Our findings have the following practical implications. (1) Accelerated construction of transportation infrastructure will ensure the high-quality development of the real economy. (2) No matter what new characteristics and new forms of business appear in the operation of the capital market under the new situation, improving listed companies' quality of information disclosure, reducing transaction costs, and optimizing the efficiency of capital market resource allocation should be basic construction projects to cultivate the capital market. (3) Geographical location and distance from megacities cannot be changed, but the continuous search for spatiotemporal compression and changes in the spatial structure, distribution structure, and hierarchical structure enlarges the driving effect of central cities, especially megacities, i.e. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.
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