A cost-benefit analysis of R&D and patents: Firm-level evidence from China

We extend the empirical framework by Peters et al. (2017) to include both R&D and patents in the productivity evolution. We provide a decomposition of the benefits of R&D into the patent and non-patent components, and a novel measure of the patent value conditioning on the firm's R&D investment. Using a sample of Chinese high-tech manufacturing firms, we find that (1) 47.8% to 67% of the benefits of R&D investment comes from non-patent R&D activities; (2) On average an invention (a utility model) patent causes around 0.76 (0.66) percent increase in the firm value; (3) The start-up costs of R&D are around ten times as large as the maintenance R&D costs. The counterfactual analysis shows that the lump-sum subsidy is more effective than the proportional subsidy in increasing the expected firm value and innovation probability. R&D continuers respond more actively than the R&D starters to the R&D subsidy. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V.