基础设施升级能够促进企业家精神成长吗?——来自高铁开通和智慧城市建设的证据

Does Infrastructure Upgrading Make Cities More Entrepreneurial?Evidence from High-Speed Railway and Smart City Construction

新时期推动基础设施建设的关键在于提质增效,统筹传统和新型基础设施规划,从而赋能经济高质量发展。基于以上现实背景,本文首先采用一个新经济地理模型揭示基础设施升级通过降低创业成本,对企业家精神产生促进作用的理论机制。实证上,整理了2005—2017年265个地级市企业工商注册信息、风险投资案例微观数据,并结合中国数字普惠金融指数和其他传统变量,以高铁开通和智慧城市建设分别作为交通、新型基础设施升级的准自然实验,通过双重差分模型得出以下结论:(1)高铁开通和智慧城市建设均显著提升了企业家精神,分区域来看,前者对于东部大型城市的积极影响更明显,而后者可以帮助中西部中小型城市弥补前者弱效应。(2)作用机制的间接验证表明,高铁开通提升了风险投资这一创业生态系统要素的流动,智慧城市建设则通过数字经济普惠性促进企业家精神。本研究为新时代如何有效利用基础设施“硬件”支撑作用激发和保护企业家精神提供了依据。

High-speed railway(HSR)is a case of transportation infrastructure;China’s HSR network has experienced extensive growth since 2009.By the end of 2019,35000 kilometers of HSR had been constructed,accounting for over 60%of the world’s total HSR length.The contents of SMC not only include the information infrastructure upgrade,but also the transformation of traditional infrastructure construction into new-type,intelligent and networked.We begin our analysis by proposing a simple new economic geography model to study the precise channels through which infrastructure contributes to entrepreneurship.Since infrastructure can reduce the costs of starting a business,it is assumed that infrastructure upgrading can promote entrepreneurship in cities.The literature also suggests that a large venture capital market size and inclusion of the digital economy are key drivers behind a city’s attractiveness to its entrepreneurship activity.Based on this theoretical framework,we apply the difference-in-differences(DID)approach with HSR’s initial operation and SMC’s pilot project as exogenous shocks to local entrepreneurship.Our sample includes all of the registration information of new enterprises and venture capital deals from 2005 to 2017 at the prefecture-city level.We also match those data with the index of digital financial inclusion(a joint project by the Institute of Digital Finance of Peking University and Ant Financial)which began from 2011.In the DID analysis,we first conduct a full-sample regression analysis,and then conduct a regression analysis of propensity score matching and regional heterogeneity test.The empirical results suggest that startup activity is positively linked to infrastructure in general,but new infrastructure is more conducive to entrepreneurship in medium and small sized cities of central and western regions than road infrastructure.The possible marginal contributions of this paper are as follows:First,the research on the impact of infrastructure on entrepreneurship has been extended to the development background of China.Second,we can observe this problem independently from a more reasonable spatial scale by using the business registration information and venture capital cases at the enterprise level and the empirical perspective at the city level.Future research can be expanded in the following three aspects:Firstly,cross regional factors can be embedded in the new economic geography model of infrastructure and entrepreneurship.Secondly,the progress of new infrastructure has been redeployed since the outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019 in China.Therefore,the concept of new infrastructure needs to be improved.Finally,we can use geographic information and spatial econometric model to further explore the spatial spillover effect of infrastructure upgrading on the growth of entrepreneurship.