A Study on the Impact of Multinational Innovation on Export Diversification of Chinese Enterprises

Against the backdrop of the accelerated evolution of the new industrial revolution, the global flow of innovation factors has accelerated, and innovation activities have increasingly broken through geographical restrictions, exhibiting deeply globalized characteristics. This paper employs a cross-country panel data-set for the period 2009-2015 based on the Chinese listed enterprises and multiple sources such as the CEPII database, and constructs a multiple fixed-effects model to conduct benchmark regression and heterogeneity analyses. To ensure the convinced regression results, this paper further applies three robustness methods for testing. It is found that, firstly, multinational innovation as a whole significantly increases the level of export diversification of enterprises, and this finding passes the robustness test. Among them, the promotion effect of foreign patent applications in China on export diversification is significantly stronger than that of Chinese overseas patent applications. Secondly, the heterogeneity analysis based on the level of national economic development shows that patent layout and technology introduction for high-income countries have a more significant effect on export product diversification, while the effect of low-income countries is relatively limited. Keywords: Multinational Innovation, Overseas Patent Applications, Foreign Patents in China, Export Diversification of Enterprises.