Examining the impact of high-speed railways on land value and government revenue: Evidence from China

The Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway operates at 300 km per hour to connect two of the most important Chinese cities within a travel time of 5 h. By exploiting a unique government land sale dataset, this paper investigates the impact of this high-speed railway on land price and then on the local government revenue. We show that the BSH generally increases the land price by about 87%, which amounts to about RMB 99 billion (around USD 14 billion) more in government land sale revenue or helps to cover about 45% of its construction cost. Furthermore, we show the heterogeneity of the impacts of the BSH on the prices of different types of land. Specifically, we find that residential land located within 3 km from a BSH station experiences a price increase of 278%. This effect is weaker for mixed-use land. Our finding shows that high-speed railway itself could serve as a key channel of infrastructure financing and government revenue sources.