High-Speed Rail as a Transport Policy Instrument for Cross-Boundary Regional Integration: Accessibility and Housing Markets in China's Huaihai Economic Zone, 2015-2023

This package contains the data and code required to reproduce the tables and figures in the paper "High-Speed Rail as a Transport Policy Instrument for Cross-Boundary Regional Integration: Accessibility and Housing Markets in China's Huaihai Economic Zone, 2015–2023." The study evaluates whether high-speed rail (HSR) investment, treated as a continuous change in gravity-weighted network accessibility, is associated with cross-boundary housing-market integration at the Anhui–Henan boundary of China's Huaihai Economic Zone. Using a 2015–2023 county-year panel of 30 county-level units, the analysis constructs a constant-GDP HSR accessibility index (destination economic mass fixed at 2015 levels, so that variation is driven by network-induced travel-time changes rather than contemporaneous destination GDP shocks) and estimates the elasticity of border- versus interior-county housing prices, with instrumental-variable, event-study, modern difference-in-differences, spatial-lag, and bootstrap/permutation robustness checks. Contents: data/ — the 30-county clean estimating sample, the cleaned county-year panel, the constant-GDP NetAccess index, the impedance-grid (gamma) accessibility series, and the 149-county geographic/classification file. code/ — Stata and Python scripts for the accessibility construction and for the OLS-TWFE baseline, least-cost-path IV, modern DiD (BJS, Callaway–Sant'Anna, de Chaisemartin–D'Haultfoeuille), SLX spatial-lag robustness, HonestDiD sensitivity, and wild-cluster bootstrap inference. figures/ — Python scripts that build the study-area maps (Figures 1 and 2) over a CLCD land-cover base. Two external datasets are required by the figure scripts and are not redistributed here: the CLCD 2020 30 m land-cover GeoTIFF (Yang & Huang 2021; available on Zenodo) and national county/province boundary shapefiles (GCS_WGS_1984). Underlying raw inputs include national passenger-rail timetables (China Railway 12306 system), HSR opening dates and station coordinates (China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. and 12306), and county-level economic variables (China County Statistical Yearbook; China Regional Economic Statistical Yearbook). See README.md inside the archive for the full folder structure, software requirements, run order, and a variable dictionary. Software: Stata 17+ (reghdfe, boottest, twowayfeweights, did/csdid, honestdid) and Python 3.10+ (pandas, numpy, geopandas, rasterio, matplotlib).