When your friend takes a fall: spillovers of patent infringement lawsuits on firm innovation via cross-owners—ECMODE

Patent infringement lawsuits profoundly affect firms’ innovation decisions, but few studies explore the influence from external uninvolved firms. Using the PSM-DID method and Chinese A-share listed firms’ data from 2009 to 2020, we examine whether patent infringement lawsuits affect innovation of firms not involved but sharing cross-owners with the involved. We find that after sued cross-held firms encounter patent infringement lawsuits, uninvolved focal firms increase innovation investment significantly. Information transmission from cross-owners is the important mechanism. Additionally, when sued cross-held firms and uninvolved focal firms belong to the same dialect region, industry, or uninvolved focal firms are non-SOEs, the innovation spillovers of patent infringement lawsuits are more obvious. Finally, we show that after uninvolved focal firms promote innovation input, their current and future innovation output goes up as well. Our study reveals the innovation spillovers of patent infringement lawsuits and expands research on inter-firm interaction through cross-owners.

专利侵权诉讼对企业的创新决策具有深远影响，但鲜有研究探讨外部未涉案企业所受的影响。本文采用倾向得分匹配-双重差分法（PSM-DID），并使用2009年至2020年中国A股上市公司数据，检验专利侵权诉讼是否会对与涉案企业存在交叉持股关系的未涉案焦点企业的创新行为产生影响。研究结果显示，当被起诉的交叉持股企业遭遇专利侵权诉讼后，未涉案的焦点企业的创新投入会显著提升。交叉持股股东的信息传递是该效应的重要作用机制。此外，当被起诉的交叉持股企业与未涉案焦点企业处于同一方言区、同一行业，或未涉案焦点企业为非国有企业（State-Owned Enterprises, SOEs）时，专利侵权诉讼的创新溢出效应更为显著。最后，研究还表明，未涉案焦点企业提升创新投入后，其当期及未来的创新产出也会随之提升。本研究揭示了专利侵权诉讼的创新溢出效应，并拓展了基于交叉持股股东视角的企业间互动相关研究。