| 简介： | China's overseas patents have grown rapidly in recent years, and China has become the world's largest exporter of merchandise goods. This paper merges Chinese exporters with their overseas patents and studies how overseas patents facilitate Chinese firms' exports. Export values are found to be positively associated with the number of patents that export destination countries grant to exporters. This association is mainly driven by the positive correlation between the number of overseas patents and the quantity of exports, rather than between overseas patents and export prices. Furthermore, the positive relationships between export values and quantities mainly take effect when the stock of patents issued by destination countries are concentrated in a small number of non-Chinese firms. These results suggest that patents effective in export destination countries allow Chinese firms to expand their export sales there because the litigation risk of patent infringement becomes lower. |