Impacts of High-Speed Rail Stations Opening on the Regional Innovation Level <br/>—Analysis Based on Scoring Tendency Matching Model

Abstract

In the background of the era of the “eight horizontal and eight vertical” high-speed rail (HSR), HSR has had a great impact on the location conditions of cities along the route, and the emergence of HSR compresses the “space-time” distance between regions, greatly promoting the flow of factors between regions. This paper analyzes the possible impact of HSR station opening on regional innovation level, tests the impact of HSR station opening on the level of urban innovation by combining the PSM model combined with panel data regression model, carries on the robustness test of the results with the tool variables, and further explores the impact of the influence on the heterogeneity of different characteristic cities. The study found that the opening of HSR stations has a significant positive impact on the improvement of regional innovation level in terms of average effect, but the cities with different locations have significant differences, and the level of urban innovation in the eastern and western regions where HSR stations are not set up is significantly higher than that of cities without HSR stations, while the impact on the eastern region is significantly greater than that of the western regions, but the opening of HSR stations has little impact on the level of urban innovation in the central and western regions, mainly because the eastern region has a good foundation for innovation, and the western region has a highly inclined support policy. This paper thinks that the government should further expand the construction of HSR network, and pay attention to the use of policy means to narrow the differences in the level of innovation between regions.