How does intellectual property system affect technology entrepreneurship: evidence from Chinese prefecture-level cities

Abstract

Technology entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role in bolstering regional economic vitality, with the intellectual property rights (IPR) system serving as a fundamental safeguard for entrepreneurs' intellectual achievements. Using panel data encompassing 260 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2019, we employ the count of registered technology-based enterprises to construct an indicator of technology entrepreneurship and consider China's IPR policy as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the impact of the IPR system on technology entrepreneurship. The findings reveal that the pilot policy can significantly stimulate technology entrepreneurship displaying a periodically dynamic promotional effect. This conclusion remains reliable even after undergoing rigorous robustness tests. The mechanism analysis demonstrates that the pilot policy can stimulate technology entrepreneurship by enriching the technological knowledge base and providing financial guarantees. Notably, while the policy's impact on technology entrepreneurship increases with the expansion of the city scale across different scenarios, no discernible regional disparities emerge. This study provides a new perspective on the relationship between the IPR system and entrepreneurship, offering valuable insights into improving the IPR framework in emerging developing countries.