Bringing Minds Together: High‐speed Railways, Team Building, and Innovation Collaboration

• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Author: Chao Li,Qian Zhou,Shi Chen
• Date: 01 November 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/cwe.12445

©2022 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

China & World Economy / 34–58, Vol. 30, No. 6, 2022

34

*Chao Li, Assistant Professor, School of Public Finance and Taxation, Southwestern University of Finance and

Economics, China. Email: chaoli@swufe.edu.cn; Qian Zhou (corresponding author), PhD Candidate, Research

Institute of Economics and Management, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China. Email:

563722799@qq.com; Shi Chen, Associate Professor, School of Law, Southwestern University of Finance and

Economics, China. Email: chenelex@hotmail.com. This research is supported fi nancially by the Humanities

and Social Sciences Project Funded by the Ministry of Education of China (No. 22XJC790006) and

Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. JBK2202028).

Bringing Minds Together: High-speed Railways,

Team Building, and Innovation Collaboration

Chao Li, Qian Zhou, Shi Chen*

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of increased travelling efficiency on “innovation

collaboration” between cities. It exploits China’s recent high-speed railway (HSR)

connections in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration. The paper instrumented

HSR connections using the postal routes of the Yuan Dynasty and measured innovation

collaboration using detailed information on patent applicants and citations. The results

show that HSRs led to an increase in innovation collaboration by 121.7 percent from

1998 to 2016, and their overall quality increased by 111.3 percent. In comparison with

universities (public sector), the paper found that private sector firms’ patent outcomes

showed a larger increase in both quantity and quality after the HSR connection.

Interestingly, we found that the teams of researchers whose members changed after

the HSR connection benefited the most in comparison with both continuing teams and

newly formed teams. Additional results prove that HSRs contributed to the coordinated

development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration. The results remained

robust using alternative model specifi cations.

Keywords: c oordinated development, high-speed railway, innovation collaboration,

travelling effi ciency

JEL codes: H54, O31, R11

I. Introduction

As research and development (R&D) has become progressively specialized, it has

become increasingly important for researchers to build cooperative teams to complement

©2022 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

High-speed Railways, Team Building, and Innovation Collaboration 35

each other and improve innovation productivity (Catalini et al., 2016; Dong et al., 2020).

The main obstacle to collaboration is the cost of communication between teammates.

Although information technology has progressed greatly in recent years, most

researchers prefer to select partners in the same community to reduce communication

costs (Katz, 1994; Mairesse and Turner, 2005; Catalini, 2018). The rapid growth of high-

speed railway (HSR) construction in China since 2008 has greatly increased travelling

effi ciency, making it easier for people to communicate face to face across regions. China

therefore provides an ideal setting for us to learn about the eff ects of increased travelling

effi ciency on innovation collaboration between cities.

To investigate this issue, we employed a diff erence-in-diff erences (DID) approach,

which compared the change in cooperative patents between city pairs (where

collaborating authors were from different cities) with direct HSR service and other

city pairs before and after the operation of HSRs. To address potential endogeneity in

the HSR connection, we followed the literature and used the postal route of the Yuan

Dynasty as an instrumental variable. Although the HSR lines were mainly planned

by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Railway Corporation,

there may still be some omitted variables that could affect both HSR placement and

innovative behaviors. The postal route of the Yuan Dynasty was constructed 600 to

700 years ago, so it should not impact regional economic development and innovation

activities directly. In this sense, the exogeneity assumption of the instrumental variable

was satisfi ed (Liu et al., 2013; Holl, 2016). On the other hand, regardless of the century,

to reduce construction costs, planners would choose fl at areas to build roads. Historical

roads and modern roads connecting the same cities would therefore frequently coincide,

which supported the correlation assumption of the study’s instrumental variable.

We compiled a rich dataset of cooperative patents of which the authors were from

different cities and gave special attention to the composition of cooperative teams.

Specifi cally, the teams were categorized into continuing teams, changed-partner teams,

teams that ceased to exist, and newly formed teams. The rich and detailed information

regarding team composition enabled us to examine whether the continuing teams’

productivity was increased, whether the match quality of teams had improved, and

whether the entry and exit of teams encouraged overall innovation output due to HSR

connections. Using information about the authors and institutes, we classified the

cooperative patents into three types of collaboration: private–private sector, private–

public sector, and public–public sector. The private sector (firm) is a profit-seeking

entity, whereas the public sector (universities) has multiple objectives. Comparing the

differentiated responses of these sectors can help us to understand the heterogeneous

impact of increased travelling effi ciency on diff erent departments’ innovative behaviors.