The impact of digital trade rules on firms' international joint patent applications

International joint patent applications, a means of legal protection for co-developed technologies by firms from different countries, are being affected by the emerging digital trade rules. We use data on firms' joint patent applications with foreign partners from the Bureau van Dijk Orbis Intellectual Property database to investigate the impact of digital trade rules on international joint patent applications at the firm level. Our empirical result suggests that digital trade rules included within preferential trade agreements significantly promote local firms' international joint patent applications. This result holds after a series of endogeneity tests and robustness checks. In addition, we find that the promotion effect is heterogeneous across the types of provisions, the digital intensity of sectors, the geographical contiguity between countries and the types of collaboration entities. Moreover, we demonstrate that digital trade rules promote firms' international joint patent applications through a critical mechanism that digital regulatory differences between countries are reduced. Furthermore, we find that digital trade rules increase the breadth, depth, and quality of firms' international joint patent applications. Overall, our study enriches the understanding of the effects of digital trade rules and sheds light on the factors that influence firms' international joint patent applications. • Digital trade rules promote firms' international joint patent applications. • The promotion effect is heterogeneous across the digital intensity of sectors. • They increase the breadth and depth of international joint patent applications.