Human capital inflow, firm innovation and patent mix

In this article, a theoretical model of heterogeneous firms is built that emphasizes how human capital inflow (HCI) affects a firm’s innovation. The model shows that when HCI increases, the cost of a firm’s innovation decreases, the relative innovation efficiency gap between any two patents decreases, and the quality of each existing patent increases, which makes firms produce more patents, improve the quality of innovation and reduce the skewness of the patent mix. Empirical tests with data from Chinese Listed Companies are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model, and robust to various estimation specifications. Moreover, the impacts of HCI vary across different types of patents, that is, both the quantity and quality of invention patents increase with HCI, while the skewness of the patent mix decreases. However, there is no evidence that HCI influences utility model patents.