Trademarks as Intellectual Property: Information Frictions, Firm Growth, and Competition
Laura Alfaro,
Cathy Ge Bao,
Maggie Chen,
Junjie Hong and
Claudia Steinwender
No 29721, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
We investigate how firms and markets adapt to trademark protection, an extensively utilized but under-examined form of intellectual property (IP) protection that addresses asymmetric information, by exploring a quasi-natural historical experiment: China’s 1923 trademark law. Exploiting unique, newly digitized firm-employee, price, and advertising data from Shanghai, we show that the unexpected introduction of the trademark law significantly reduced information frictions and shaped firm growth and organization on opposite sides of trademark conflicts. Western firms that suffered from counterfeits reduced dependence on alternative communication channels and gained market share from Japanese counterparts who were most frequently accused of counterfeiting. The trademark law also fostered relationships between Western firms and domestic intermediaries, both within and beyond firm boundaries. The increased protection led to heterogeneous price responses and new varieties, demonstrating a coexistence of trademark protection and competitive markets. In contrast, previous institutional attempts to protect trademarks were broadly unsuccessful.
JEL-codes: D2 F2 N4 O1 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-his and nep-ipr
Note: DAE IO ITI PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29721.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Trademarks as Intellectual Property: Information Frictions, Firm Growth, and Competition (2022) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29721
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29721
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().