This paper selects the panel data of 297 cities in China from 2003 to 2017 and analyzes the effects of government efficiency and innovation environment on the relationship between high-speed rail opening and economic growth from the perspective of government competition pressure and information flow by using the approach of difference-in-differences (DID). The findings are as follows: first, the opening of high-speed rail has a significant promoting effect on regional economic growth; second, government efficiency has negative impact on the relationship between high-speed rail development and economic growth, while the innovation environment has positive impact on this relationship; third, the moderating effects of government efficiency and innovation environment exhibit regional heterogeneity. This paper provides a new perspective from the perspectives of government competition pressure and information flow for understanding the impact of high-speed rail on the economy, offering insights for promoting the coordinated and sustainable development of the Chinese economy.

This paper investigates whether managers use knowledge transferred from university-industry collaboration when making investment decisions on labor. To establish causality, we use a difference-in-difference method based on the staggered establishment of postdoctoral workstations in Chinese firms. We find that postdoctoral workstations enable managers to improve labor investment efficiency and thus help mitigate over- and under-investment problems in labor, and the higher the operational quality of the workstation, the more significant the increase in investment efficiency. This finding is robust to utilizing the event study approach, placebo test, propensity score matching, instrumental variable, and entropy balancing. Brain gain and knowledge transfer effects between universities and industries are two plausible mechanisms. Furthermore, the main effect is more pronounced for firms located closer to prestigious universities, firms are non-state-owned enterprises, human-capital-intensive, have political connections, and without national fellows’ lead. Our findings suggest that brain gain in firms does not merely increase or reduce labor investments Per se, but rather inspires managers to maintain optimal labor levels through knowledge transfer processes.