The Path of University Basic Research Innovation Improvement:Based on the Perspective of Local Communication Cost
As the source of science,basic research plays a decisive role in improving a country's overall innovation level and solving key technological problems.Promoting innovation in basic research is crucial for the endogenous driving force of a country's economic growth and is particularly important for the development and security of a country.Therefore,how to promote innovation,especially basic research,in the process of China's modernization is a vital question that needs to be answered.In the innovation process of basic and applied research,it is important to have interaction between researchers,especially face-to-face communications.Reducing communication costs plays an important driving role in both applied and basic research innovation.This study investigates how lower local communication costs promote basic research in China using data from published studies.The extensive infrastructure development of China has not only propelled the country toward becoming a powerhouse in transportation but also significantly contributed to reducing the cost of interactions.With an increasing number of cities launching rail transit to alleviate congestion and reduce commuting times,as of the end of 2021,51 cities across 31 provinces(including autonomous regions,that is,municipalities directly under the Central Government)and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps had 269 urban rail transit lines in operation,covering a total length of 8,708 kilometers.Over the past two decades,there has been a notable increase in both the operational mileage and passenger volume of China's subways.Compared with applied research,the outcomes of basic research innovation are more open and easily disseminated,thus generating more knowledge spillovers from face-to-face interactions.We consider the construction of urban subways as a quasi-natural experiment and employ a difference-in-differences approach to identify the causal effect of reduced local communication costs on academic exchanges,scientific collaboration,and basic research output.We constructed an indicator of basic research innovation output based on the paper publication data at the discipline level of Chinese universities from 2006 to 2020 in the China University Science and Technology Achievement Statistics Analysis Database and compiled and considered the opening time of subways in Chinese cities as an exogenous shock that reduces local communication costs.Based on these data,we constructed an indicator of basic research innovation output at the year-city-university discipline level and information on the opening of subways at the city-year level.Using the exogenous variation of the opening of subways in different cities and years,we identified the impact of subways on basic research using the difference-in-differences method.Additionally,we analyzed the impact of reduced local communication costs on scientific collaboration using information on 2,294,767 SSCI and SCI papers published by Chinese scholars from 2006 to 2020 obtained from the Web of Science(WOS).The empirical results reveal that the opening of subway systems has a significant promoting effect on basic research innovation.The reduction of local communication costs leads to a significant increase of approximately 4％at the year-university discipline level.The heterogeneity analysis indicates that the reduction of local communication costs mainly drives high-quality basic research output.Moreover,there exists heterogeneity in the impact of the reduction of local communication costs on basic research among universities,mainly promoting basic research output in non-double first-class universities.The mechanism analysis reveals that the reduction of local communication costs not only promotes knowledge flow,as evidenced by a significant increase in the number of paper downloads,but also promotes the sharing of local experimental facilities,ultimately driving scientific cooperation among researchers in the city.Empirical evidence based on WOS data reveals that the reduction of local communication costs increases the probability of local scientific cooperation by 16.7％and significantly increases the number of collaborators by 8％on the original basis.
Face-to-face InteractionLocal Communication CostsScientific CollaborationUniversity Innovation
万方数据
维普
