1 / 8

“Doing R&D in Countries with Weak IPR Protection”

“Doing R&D in Countries with Weak IPR Protection”. By Minyuan Zhao Comments by David Hsu, Wharton. Paper summary & importance. Hypotheses Technologies developed in weak IPR countries are used more internally than those developed in other foreign countries

booth
Download Presentation

“Doing R&D in Countries with Weak IPR Protection”

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. “Doing R&D in Countries with Weak IPR Protection” By Minyuan Zhao Comments by David Hsu, Wharton

  2. Paper summary & importance • Hypotheses • Technologies developed in weak IPR countries are used more internally than those developed in other foreign countries • Firms doing R&D in weak IPR countries feature stronger linkages than those who do not • Important issues investigated • Firm level action given institutional IPR environments • Arbitrage opportunity available only to certain firms

  3. Different motivations for entry? • Strong IPR environments associated with “knowledge clusters” & greater availability of (local) knowledge spillovers, leading to “home base augmenting” R&D labs • More diverse knowledge base & fewer self citations • May want to do R&D in weaker IPR environments if geographically proximate to large local markets and/or manufacturing, leading to “home base exploiting” R&D labs • Still may be patentable innovations • Fewer local knowledge spillovers & more self citations • These explanations do not rely on internal organizational linkages

  4. Internal linkage & self-citations • Self-cites could also proxy for speed of exploitation, which is a different appropriation mode (though not mutually exclusive with formal IPR protection) • A different interpretation than tight internal linkage • Internal organizational linkages or complexity of technical development (even within technology class)? • Specialized knowledge of technical development (captured in Lambda?) may account for observed pattern of self cites • Project-level vs. firm-level variation in technological complexity? • But natural upper bound on technological complexity due to international R&D collaboration (codifiable knowledge that can be “chunked” and reassembled) • Self citation may be one dimension of internal linkage; citations in a given technical domain may be another important dimension

  5. Source: Rosenkopf and Nerkar (2001)

  6. Source: Trajtenberg (2001)

  7. Source: Trajtenberg (2001)

  8. Some issues • Show descriptive statistics of geographic locus of innovation in weak IPR countries • Unpack WEAK by including country dummy variables in multivariate analyses? • Are the results robust to alternate definitions of patent assignment to weak IPR country? • Weight first (and last?) inventors more? • Occurrence of “pure” cases: all inventors from weak IPR countries? • Would be helpful to unpack the control variables (Lambdas) in the text and tables • Show robustness to different groups of controls • Show importance of patents (forward citations) developed under different IPR regimes relative to the relevant time-technology cohort • To give a sense of the relative importance of internalization arbitrage • Hard to separate expropriation risk in weak IPR countries from political & regulatory risks • Implications for risk management are different • Bases for arbitrage different

More Related