Publication

This paper investigates whether proximity to universities matters for corporate patenting in Chinese provinces. The investigation is based on estimating regional knowledge production functions using a Chinese provincial data set for the years from 2000 to 2008. The results suggest the existence of spatial academic effects on corporate patenting activities in China as found in the previous literature for Western economies. In China, however, these effects are especially strong for realizing technologically less demanding non-invention corporate patents than for invention corporate patents. Moreover, companies’ geographic proximity to universities dominates over university research quality difference for determining the relevance of universities as knowledge sources for companies.