University-Industry Cooperation and Regional Economic Convergence: The Moderating Role of Intellectual Property Protection

The objective of the investigation is to evaluate the effect of university-industry cooperation (UIC) on regional economic convergence using Chinese Provincial data from 2005 to 2017. The results show that UIC has an active impact on regional economic convergence, and the intellectual property protection (IPP) plays a moderating role on this relationship. We further take the regional heterogeneity into consideration and find that IPP actively promotes economic convergence in the eastern and western regions and cluster with lower level of innovation, while IPP has no obvious impact on regional economic convergence in the middle region and cluster with higher level of innovation. This research provides practical implications for encouraging the initiative of UIC to drive regional coordinated development.