Kiel Working Papers, Kiel Institute for World Economics
No 1796:
The Role of Proximity to Universities for Corporate Patenting - Provincial Evidence from China
Wan-Hsin Liu
Abstract: This paper investigates whether proximity to universities
matters for corporate patenting in Chinese provinces. The investigation is
based on estimating regional knowledge production functions using a Chinese
provincial dataset for the years from 2000 to 2008. Geographic proximity of
companies to universities is taken as a key element to measure firms’
accessibility to university research. In addition, quality-adjusted
accessibility measures are considered in extended models to take into
account quality difference in university research. The results suggest the
existence of spatial academic effects on corporate patenting activities in
China as found in the previous literature for Western economies. In China,
however, these effects are especially strong for realising technologically
less demanding non-invention corporate patents than for invention corporate
patents. Moreover, companies’ geographic proximity to universities
dominates over university research quality difference for determining the
relevance of universities as knowledge sources for companies. Extended
models are estimated for robustness checks which ascertain the main
results
Keywords: spatial proximity, logsum accessibility, university, corporate patenting, China; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: O31,; O53,; R11; (follow links to similar papers)
39 pages, September 2012
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