Does university-industry collaboration improve firm productivity? ：Evidence from China

University has been an indispensable force in China's innovation and economic growth, and China's government intensively promotes university-firm collaboration to stimulate knowledge and technology transfer between firms and universities. Thus, analyzing the impact of university-industry collaboration on the performance of firms will help us understand the significance of universities to China's economic development. As existing research lacks attention to the impact of UIC on the productivity of China's firms, this study examines the impact of university-industry collaboration on firm productivity using natural language processing and by matching China's intellectual property and listed firms' operation databases. The empirical results show that university-industry collaboration can promote firm productivity by improving the quality of firms' innovation, strengthening internalization efficiency, and broadening firms' research horizons. Moreover, the university-industry collaboration process has a pronounced effect on promoting firm productivity in technology-intensive and intellectual property-intensive industries. From the university-industry collaboration perspective, this study interprets China's economic development and provides new insights for developing countries regarding using universities to alleviate the insufficiency of private R&D investment.