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Discussion Papers
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research

Intellectual Property Use in Middle Income Countries: The Case of Chile

Fink, Carsten; Hall, Bronwyn H.; Helmers, Christian (2018). Intellectual Property Use in Middle Income Countries: The Case of ChileWIPO Economic Research Working Paper No. 43.

We analyze the use of intellectual property (IP) by firms in Chile over the decade 1995-2005
as the then middle-income country experienced rapid economic growth of 4.7 percent per year. We use a novel dataset that contains a combination of detailed firm-level information from the annual manufacturing census, information on firms’ innovative activities from Chile’s
innovation surveys, and firms’ patent, industrial design, and trademark filings with the Chilean IP office. We use these data to look at how IP use by companies has changed over time and analyze the determinants of IP use, in particular first-time use. We find that sales growth prompts first-time use of patents and trademarks, though such use does not change the growth trajectory of firms nor does it improve their total factor productivity. We also find that trademark use is associated with new-to-the-world product innovation, which suggests that branding may be an important mechanism to appropriate returns to innovation in a middle-income country like Chile.

https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_econstat_wp_43.pdf

Also published as NBER Working Paper No. 24348

Published in: Economic Development and Cultural Change Volume 70,Number 1, October 2021, pp. 321–357