Banking systems, innovations, intellectual property protections, and financial markets: Evidence from China

One unique feature of the emerging economies in Asia is the rich variation in the development of financial systems and technological sectors across different geographical areas. This unbalanced evolution provides us a potentially more powerful setting to investigate the dynamics among banking systems, innovations, intellectual property (IP) protections, and stock market reactions that are especially useful in understanding the policy-finance-innovation nexus in emerging economies. Using newly available data from China, this study confirms the nurturing role of financial systems on innovations, the value-enhancing function of firms' innovative activities, and the lead-lag predictive role of innovations on stock returns, in the context of emerging economies. More importantly, the study documents that stronger provincial IP protections reduce patent piracy and hence enhance local firms' market values. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.