Discussion Papers
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research
Intellectual Property as Loan Collateral
(2023). Intellectual Property as Loan Collateral.
This study provides a first comprehensive picture of the use of intellectual property (IP) as loan collateral, its determinants, and its effect on firm trajectories. Using novel administrative data, we exploit the French institutional setting and show that firms from diverse industries use selected trademarks (72%), patents (26%), and designs (2%) to secure loans. We find that IP pledges have large positive effects on debt financing, in particular for small, financially constrained firms. The results are robust to exogenous variation in the pledgeability of alternative collateral. Further, using IP as loan collateral is associated with sizable increases in firm-level growth.