题目: Guanxi Culture and Firm Innovations
时间：2017年4月12日（星期三） 16：00-17：30
Abstract:While the benefits from social network and other informal governance mechanisms in helping promote China's economic growth have been discussed in the literature, we explore the potential negative impact of guanxi culture on firm innovation in the current paper. Based on city level guanxi culture intensity measures constructed from the CHIP data and firm level innovation measures from the industrial survey and the patent database, we study how the guanxi culture affects firm innovation input and output. We find that firms in regions that value guanxi culture more tend to have less R&D, less new product sales, as well as fewer patent applications and approvals. Furthermore, the impact is larger for inventions and utility models, which are more important innovation than exterior designs. When firm hetergeneity is examined, we find that guanxi culture affects different firms through different mechanisms: While guanxi culture seems to influence the private sector through the channel of resource allocation to R&D, state-owned-enterprises (SOEs) are impacted via efficiency loss in innovation. Our findings are robust when instrumental variables are used to address endogeneity. Given the importance of innovation in the 'new normal economy', our findings have important implications for institutional reforms in China, including IP protection and contract protection.
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