Intellectual Property Rights and Firm-level Productivity Growth in China : New Evidence from a Nonlinear Approach

This paper explores the way that intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection affects firm-level productivity growth through innovation and diffusion. Allowing for conditional average treatment effect, I find strong evidence for heterogeneous effects of both patenting and importing activities on firm productivity in Chinese manufacturing. The productivity effect of patenting is positively dependent on the protection of IPRs, while that of importing is first negatively and then positively affected by IPRs. I also find that overstrict protection of IPRs can reduce the productivity impact of both channels and firms in private sector are more reliant on IPRs to improve productivity through filing patents