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| High-speed Rail and Enterprise Digital Transformation——A Dual Perspective Based on Information and Resource Effects |
| SHEN Kunrong, YAN Jiamin
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| School of Business, Nanjing University |
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Abstract Promoting the digital transformation of enterprises can not only promote the deep integration of the digital economy with the real economy but also accelerate the formation of new quality productive forces, serving as the main lever for implementing a series of current policy objectives. However, the digital transformation of Chinese enterprises is still in the initial exploratory stage. Most enterprises are trapped in the dilemma of insufficient resources for digital transformation and are also facing the problem of organizational changes and management models that cannot adapt to digital transformation. The failure rate of enterprise digital transformation remains high, and there is an urgent need for external support. Most existing literature focuses on the economic consequences of digital transformation, while there is a relative lack of research on the drivers of digital transformation. Considering this, this paper attempts to examine the mechanism of the impact of high-speed rail (HSR) opening on the digital transformation of enterprises.
This study posits that the opening of HSR significantly reduces the spatial and temporal distance, capable of breaking down the information barriers caused by geographical distance and promoting the aggregation of talent capital and other elements in the cities along the line. On one hand, the opening of HSR dismantles the information barriers due to geographical distance, making cross-regional exchanges between enterprises more convenient. Given the high-risk nature of digital transformation, enterprises have a motive to “imitate” the experiences of upstream and downstream enterprises in the process of digital transformation. After the opening of HSR, frequent offline exchanges between upstream and downstream enterprises will facilitate the diffusion of digital transformation experience information along the supply chain, which is beneficial to solving the problem of insufficient transformation experience. On the other hand, the core-periphery theory suggests that transportation infrastructure can improve trade conditions between regions, prompting the continuous flow of production factors from peripheral areas to central areas. HSR can attract production factors to gather in cities along the line by enhancing market potential, thereby alleviating the difficulties enterprises face in talent shortages and financing constraints during the digital transformation process. Therefore, this paper investigates the impact of HSR opening on enterprise digital transformation.
This paper constructs a multi-time-point difference-in-differences model to study the impact of HSR opening on enterprise digital transformation and its mechanism of action. The study finds that the opening of HSR significantly promotes the digital transformation of enterprises. After overcoming the endogeneity problem of HSR opening by constructing instrumental variables with the “minimum spanning tree” and conducting parallel trend tests, spillover effect tests, and robust estimations of heterogeneity treatment effects, the findings of the study still hold. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the promotional effect of HSR opening on enterprise digital transformation is more pronounced in enterprises with executives who have a digital background, in strategic emerging industries, and regions with better institutional environments. Mechanism analysis shows that the information learning effect and the resource agglomeration effect are important pathways through which HSR opening promotes enterprise digital transformation. The information learning effect is manifested in HSR opening facilitating enterprises to learn digital transformation experiences from upstream and downstream enterprises in the supply chain, solving the problem of insufficient experience in enterprise digital transformation; the resource agglomeration effect is manifested in HSR opening driving the agglomeration of factors such as talent and capital, addressing the issue of resource scarcity in enterprise digital transformation.
The marginal contributions of this paper are threefold. First, it complements the literature on the economic effects of HSR. This paper examines the causal effect of HSR opening on enterprise digital transformation, which not only complements the research on the effect of HSR opening from the perspective of enterprise digital transformation, but also has policy implications for effectively promoting the development of new quality productivity in practice. Second, it enriches the research literature on the driving factors of enterprise digital transformation. This paper verifies the impact of the opening of HSR on enterprise digital transformation from the two mechanisms: information learning effect and resource agglomeration effect, which provides useful insights for enterprises to get rid of the digital transformation dilemma of “not daring to change” due to lack of experience and “not being able to change” due to lack of resources. Third, the opening of HSR is a typical multi-temporal event, and the assessment of its policy effect is easily disturbed by the heterogeneity treatment effect. This paper adopts a robust estimator of heterogeneous treatment effects to identify the impact effects of the opening of HSR, which provides a reference for subsequent studies on assessing the effects of HSR.
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Published: 01 September 2024
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