Patent Citations and Knowledge Spillovers: An Analysis of Chinese Patents Registered in the US

This paper examines US patent citation data and analyzes how different firms in China affect knowledge spillovers. Patents granted by the US patent office to inventors located in China are collected along with their citation counts. Two kinds of patent citations, namely, citations of previous patents and those of non-patent literature, are used to measure knowledge flows. In the empirical analysis, the negative binomial and zero-inflated count models are considered. The regression results suggest the existence of heterogeneity among firms of different ownership. In terms of knowledge spillovers, US multinational corporations (MNC) perform better than those from other western countries; Taiwanese companies outperform their counterparts from Hong Kong; and Chinese private corporations contribute more than Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). These results have important policy implications for the development of a knowledge-intensive economy in China.