Journal
TRANSPORT POLICY
Volume 115, Issue -, Pages 126-140Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2021.11.004
Keywords
Rail transport; Export skewness; Product mix; Affiliated businesses; Efficiency
Categories
Funding
- National Social Science Foundation of China [18ZDA071]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This paper investigates the impact of separating affiliated businesses from rail operations and the associated efficiency gain on firms' exporting decisions. An economic model shows that an improvement in rail operations efficiency increases product variety but decreases export skewness. Using China's rail reform as a quasi-natural experiment, this study empirically verifies and quantifies the findings, finding that separating affiliated businesses significantly improves the efficiency of China's rail operations, leading to increased rail exports with more variety and reduced skewness.
This paper investigates the impact of separating the affiliated businesses from rail operations and the associated efficiency gain on firms' exporting decisions by rail. First, an economic model was built to analytically show that an efficiency improvement in rail operations would increase the firm's product variety but decreases the skewness of export by rail. The paper then utilized China's rail reform to separate the affiliated businesses from the rail sector in 2003 as a quasi-natural experiment and adopted the difference-in-differences (DID) method to empirically verify and quantify the analytical findings. Specifically, it is found the reform to separate the affil-iated businesses significantly improved the efficiency of China's rail operations. The resultant efficiency gain then encouraged firms to export by rail, with more variety of export products and higher value. More impor-tantly, the firm's skewness of export by rail has also been reduced. The relevant policy implications have also been provided.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available