Do Cross-border Patents Promote Trade?

Claire Brunel and Thomas Zylkin

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: While we would expect that cross-border patents are used to protect a technology that is made available in another country, that technology could either be produced locally or imported. International patent filings could therefore be either complements or substitutes to international trade. This study combines data on patenting and trade for 149 countries and 249 industries between 1974 and 2006 with a "three-way" PPML panel data model that addresses several biases emphasized in the trade literature in order to provide a systematic analysis of how bilateral trade responds to cross-border patent filings. We find that cross-border patents have a positive (complementary) overall effect on the patent-filing country's exports to the patent-granting country and no effect overall on imports flowing in the opposite direction. These effects vary substantially across industries and destination markets. Patents promote significantly more bilateral export growth--and significantly less bilateral import growth--in less-differentiated industries and are found to have stronger effects on exports to more distant destinations. These findings support the interpretation that cross-border patents are mainly used to protect cost and/or quality innovations from being adopted by producers of competing products in the patent-granting country.

Keywords: F10; F13; F14; O34; K33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F13 F14 K33 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-int, nep-ipr, nep-law and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/92514/1/MPRA_paper_92514.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/94695/1/MPRA_paper_94695.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/106644/5/MPRA_paper_106644.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do cross‐border patents promote trade? (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:92514

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