As China’s economy enters the digital era, guiding enterprises to conduct better digital transformations has become an urgent problem to be solved. In this regard, this paper builds a multiperiod DID model to empirically examine the impact of opening a high-speed railway (HSR) on corporate digital transformation by matching the data of HSR with the data of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2019. It was found that (1) the opening of an HSR can significantly improve corporate digital transformation, and this finding still held after considering endogeneity issues and various robustness tests. (2) A heterogeneity analysis showed that the promoting effect of opening an HSR on corporate digital transformation was mainly found in nonstate enterprises, high-tech enterprises, and enterprises located in cities with low initial transportation endowment. (3) A mechanistic analysis found that opening an HSR can promote corporate digital transformation by promoting senior staff mobility, increasing industry competition, and enhancing financial agglomeration. This paper not only enriches the research related to the economic consequences of opening an HSR, but it also has important implications for guiding enterprises to successfully conduct corporate digital transformations.

Under the background of the economy “shifting from real to virtual”, how to guide real enterprises to return to their main businesses has become an urgent problem to be solved in the stage of microeconomic bodies moving toward high-quality development. Based on the perspective of the opening of high-speed railway (HSR), this paper builds a time-varying DID model to systematically test the relationship between HSR and corporate financialization by matching the data of HSR among 286 cities in China with the data of A-share non-financial companies listed in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets. The results showed that there is a significant negative correlation between HSR and corporate financialization, i.e., the opening of HSR can significantly inhibit corporate financialization. This conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests. Mechanism analysis found that the opening of HSR can restrain corporate financialization through “crowding-out effects” and “liquidity replenishment effects”. Heterogeneity analysis showed that the inhibitory effect of HSR on corporate financialization is more significant in large enterprises, fiercely competitive industries, and cities with high initial transportation resources. This paper deeply explored the relationship between the opening of HSR and corporate financialization, which not only enriches the existing literature but also provides a useful reference for guiding real enterprises to actively return to their main businesses.

There is an urgent need to change the economic development mode from “resources driven” to “innovation driven” with the stagnation of the economy in China. Most existing research on the effect of high-speed rail (HSR) on firm innovation has lacked theoretical support and empirical evidence of firm innovation through knowledge spillover. This study introduces HSR as a cost coefficient to the classical heterogeneous firm model to construct a theoretical framework to determine the impact of HSR on firms’ innovation output. By matching the data of listed firms with the data of prefecture-level cities, the general difference-in-differences (DID) method is used to explore the impact of HSR on firm innovation and its mechanism. The research shows that the construction of HSR has a significant effect on the number of applied patent and authorized patents of firms and that there is a marginal increasing trend relating to the density and timing of HSR. The study found that in peripheral cities, firms in industries with rapid technological advances and highly innovative behaviors benefit more from HSR. HSR is associated with knowledge spillover within and between central and peripheral cities. It also has a heterogeneous sorting effect bounded by city size that promotes highly educated talent and the innovative output of firms that becomes significant only after the population size of a city reaches a certain threshold. HSR stimulates firm innovation mainly by improving the effect of firm resource allocation, promoting the spillover effect of innovation due to the flow and aggregation of resources, and increasing the scale effect of market expansion. Therefore, when designing innovation policies, the role of improving the construction of transportation to increase the frequency of face-to-face communication should be included, thus promoting the flow of knowledge and research collaboration.