Every Mile Counts: Geographical Distance as Administrative Burden in Intellectual Property Services

Abstract While existing research has examined procedural and informational sources of administrative burden, this paper examines how organizational design choices about the geographic location of administrative authority institutionalize spatial burdens on firms. We leverage China's decentralization reform in trademark registration services as a natural experiment to test this theory. This reform reduced geographic distance by establishing local acceptance windows across the country from 2016 to 2019. Prior to this reform, trademark applications had to be submitted exclusively at the centralized Beijing office, imposing substantial geographic barriers on firms nationwide. Using a unique dataset covering over 37 million trademark applications from 294 Chinese cities, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences approach to estimate the causal effects of reduced geographic distance on trademark filings. We find that establishing local acceptance windows increased trademark applications by approximately 4.4 percent, or roughly 209,000 additional filings in 2019 alone. Moreover, the reform generated compound distributional outcomes: small and medium-sized enterprises responded more strongly than larger firms, and the new applicants drawn into the trademark system were concentrated in cities with thinner infrastructure. Mechanism analysis confirms that this increase is primarily driven by distance reduction rather than improvements in administrative efficiency or reductions in corruption. The findings provide large-scale causal evidence on the behavioral consequences of redistributing administrative service delivery across space, demonstrating that physical accessibility remains crucial for equitable service uptake even amid the digital transformation of administrative services.