Dr. Philipp Boeing (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management)

Programm

• Datum: 20.03.2012
  Zeit: 14:00 - 15:00
  Ort: Kaulbachstr. 45, Raum 202

Technological Capabilities of Chinese Enterprises - Who Is Going to Compete Abroad?

The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between increasing Chinese high-tech exports and the technological capabilities of Chinese companies. China’s recent innovation policy provides substantial incentives for companies to pursue technological upgrading and internationalization strategies. For our analysis, we build on models of New New Trade Theory and include the aspect of the technological capabilities of companies. This study is still at an exploratory stage. We collected a data set for all Chinese firms listed either at the Shanghai or the Shenzhen stock exchanges and combined the firm-level data with information on national and international patent applications of the firms. At the moment we use the share of international patent applications as a proxy for exports because we do not yet have trade information at the firm level. We are in the process of obtaining the trade data separately for high-, medium- and low-tech exports and disaggregated according to the target country.

As a preliminary exercise, we correlated the share of patent applications at international patent offices with firm and invention characteristics. We find that firms with higher levels of total factor productivity and firms with more highly cited inventions have a higher propensity to apply for international patent protection. There is weak evidence that a higher share of inventors based abroad is also related to a higher share of international patent applications.

The talk will be an informal presentation of work in progress with the purpose of discussing some interesting research questions.