Operation of high-speed rail and reduction of corporate pollution: evidence from China

As an environmentally friendly means of transport, the high-speed rail (HSR) is conducive to promoting corporate performance. An innovative approach extends the impact of HSR networks on pollution emissions from the regional level to the micro-enterprise level. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the opening of HSR, a difference-in-difference model is used to investigate the impact of HSR on enterprise pollution emission levels and its action mechanism by using the matched data from the Chinese Enterprise Pollution Emission Database, the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database, and the Chinese City Statistical Yearbook from 2000 to 2010. The results show that opening HSR significantly reduces the enterprises’ pollution emission level, while reducing the number of polluting enterprises and transportation costs as well as improving the innovation capacity of enterprises are the corresponding action mechanisms. The impact of HSR on the enterprises’ pollution emission varies with industry intensity, population size, and regional economic development level. The conclusions not only provide important insights to increase the ecological quality of China’s environment through transportation infrastructure upgrades but also bring some guidance to more developing countries to improve their air environment.