Abstract: As a "National Name Card", high-speed railway not only highlights " China's speed", but also deeply affects the regional economy and corporate behavior. Using the opening of high-speed railways as an exogenous shock to measure the reduction of agency problems, this study tries to investigate the relationship between the opening of high-speed railways and behavior of listed companies from the perspective of M&A performance. The results show that the opening of high-speed railway can significantly improve the short-term and long-term market performance of acquisition. The results hold after a series of robustness tests. In the mechanism test part, this study finds that the opening of high-speed railway may affect the M&A performance of enterprises through the channel of "alleviating the agency problem". The further test results show that due to the existence of "home bias", the impact of high-speed railway opening on the M&A performance of enterprises is more significant when the listed company and the merged enterprise are not in the same province. Taking high-speed railway as the starting point, this paper discusses the influence of geographic distance on the financial behavior of a company, which can expand the application scope of new geographic economics in the field of corporate finance. In addition, this paper provides empirical evidence and research perspective for the economic consequences of high-speed rail service and the influencing factors of M&A performance.

Key words: high-speed railways, M&A performance, agency problem