摘要
强有力的知识产权司法保护是激励创新的重要保障。本文利用北上广2014年试点知识产权法院的准自然实验,以2011-2018年沪深A股公司为对象,运用双重差分模型评估了知识产权司法保护强化对公司创新的影响。研究发现,知识产权法院显著抑制了公司的研发投入和专利申请,且存在时间滞后和动态影响;机制分析发现,知识产权法院不会显著影响高质量专利申请但会促使整体专利结构向高质量专利偏移,表明知识产权法院体现出创新抑制效应的原因在于减少了低质量专利申请;异质性分析发现,知识产权法院的创新抑制效应主要存在于创新能力较弱、中央产业政策支持、出口比重较低以及非国有产权的企业。进一步研究发现,知识产权法院显著提高了专利的引用价值、应用价值以及市场价值,表明设立知识产权法院有助于形成长效激励机制。本文厘清了当前环境中知识产权司法保护强化与中国公司创新的关系,为知识产权司法体制改革和国家创新驱动发展战略的实施提供了参考。
Innovation is a driving force in today’s economy,but investing in new technologies,products,or services is risky and challenging.However,competitive markets may under incentivize innovation because innovative ideas are often imitated by competitors and leads to the result that private returns to innovation investments are lower than their social returns.Therefore,conventional wisdom holds that unless would-be competitors are restrained from imitating an invention,the inventor may not reap enough profit to cover that cost.The existing literature,which assumes that firms always pursue to high-quality innovation to earn much monopolized rent,explores empirical links between the strengthening of judicial protection of intellectual property and the level of corporate innovation.In fact,many firms’innovation aims to construct patent barriers,or achieve political goals,indicating that firms sometimes tend to conduct low-quality innovation.Moreover,the effective enforcement of intellectual property laws is critical to protect intellectual property.However,much of the existing literature is based on the reform of intellectual property laws,such as patent law reform,which fails to investigate the effect of enforcement efficiency of intellectual property laws on corporate innovation.China provides a perfect setting to study the influence of strengthening judicial protection of intellectual property on corporate innovation.Chinese government implements various industry policies to motivate innovation by low-priced capital,like other emerging markets.However,the criterion of industry policies funds firms is the number of filed patents,which leads to that firms file tremendous low-quality patents to get more grants from the government.This is completely different from the assumption of existing literature.At the same time,there is a high incidence of intellectual property infringement cases in China.The number of new patent infringement cases in 2018 increased to 33,976,and the annual growth rate was 62.05%from 2012 to 2018,which was far more than America and Europe.Although the examination of international treaties which has been approved by China builds an advanced and complete intellectual property rights law system on par with that of more developed economies,including the patent law and the trademark law,the enforcement of intellectual property laws is still poor.In 2014,Chinese government,to strengthen intellectual property protection,established intellectual property courts at Beijing,Shanghai and Guangzhou,to hear infringement cases.The intellectual property courts greatly have improved the enforcement of intellectual property laws because they are more independent,more professional and more efficient.This pare used A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2018 as the sample to evaluate the impact of strengthening judicial protection on corporate innovation with the difference-in-differences method,based on the quasi-natural experiment of establishing intellectual property courts in 2014.The results find that the R&D level and the number of filed patents significantly decrease after establishing intellectual property courts.The dynamic test shows that the difference of innovation in treatment and control groups is insignificant before establishing intellectual property courts,indicating that the results are not driven by the reverse causality.The mechanism test shows that intellectual property courts do not change the number of high-quality patents,but lead to a significant increase of the proportion of high-quality patents in all filed patents,indicating that intellectual property courts inhibit firms’low-quality patents.Further,cross-sectional test finds that the inhibition is more pronounced in firms with low innovation capability,in firms with low exports,in firms supported by the national industry policy,and in state-owned firms.Lastly,the value of corporate innovation significantly increases after establishing intellectual property courts.This paper makes the following contributions.First,this paper embeds the dominant model of corporate innovation in the existing theoretical framework,and explores the influence of strengthening judicial protection of intellectual property on corporate innovation.In contrast with previous studies,this paper provides direct evidence that strengthening judicial protection leads to a decrease of low-quality innovation.Second,much of the existing literature ignores the effective enforcement of law is vital to protect intellectual property.This paper employs a unique exogenous event that China establishes intellectual property courts in 2014 to investigate the relation between the improvement of enforcement of intellectual property laws and corporate innovation.Third,this paper also provides evidence to that the intellectual property protection and government funding are equally important to motivate innovation,which provides reference to innovation incentive policies,especially in emerging markets.
作者
黎文靖
彭远怀
谭有超
LI Wenjing;PENG Yuanhuai;TAN Youchao(School of Management,Jinan University)
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2021年第5期144-161,共18页
Economic Research Journal
基金
国家自然科学基金面上项目(71772078)
暨南大学宁静致远工程项目(19JNLH03)的资助。
关键词
公司创新
知识产权
司法保护
Corporate Innovation
Intellectual Property
Judicial Protection
作者简介
黎文靖,暨南大学管理学院,邮政编码:510632,电子信箱:tliwenjing@jnu.edii.cn;彭远怀,暨南大学管理学院,邮政编码:510632,电子信箱:yhpeng@stu2019.jnu.edu.cn;通讯作者:谭有超,暨南大学管理学院,邮政编码:510632,电子信箱:tanyouchao@jnu.edu.cn。
