Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai's Concession Era

Department of Economics & Decision Sciences

Speaker : Claudia Steinwender

Assistant Professor at MIT Sloan

Videoconference

Abstract :

Intellectual property (IP) institutions have been a salient topic of economic research and a prime cause of political disputes, including the latest U.S.-China trade war. In this paper, we investigate the effects of trademark protection, an under-examined form of IP protection, by exploring a historical precedent: China's trademark law of 1923---a law enacted not to protect the domestic economy; but an unanticipated, disapproved response to end conflicts between foreign powers. Exploiting a unique, newly digitized firm-level dataset from Shanghai in 1870-1941 and bilateral product-level data on Chinese imports in 1920-1928, we show that the trademark law spurred employment growth, organizational change, and rising imports for Western firms with greater dependence on trademark protection. In contrast, Japanese businesses, who had frequently been accused of counterfeiting, experienced employment contractions. Finally, we show that previous attempts by foreign powers to strengthen trademark protection --- such as extraterritoriality rights, bilateral commercial treaties, and an unenforced legal trademark code --- were ultimately unsuccessful.