ClimaTRACES Workshop

An event by the climaTRACES Lab. Ziming Wang (PhD Student, University of Tokyo) About this workshop This paper examines how Tesla’s 2014 patent pledge affected entrepreneurial outcomes in China. Using venture capital investment data on Chinese startups from Tesla’s founding month to the end of 2019, we employ a difference-in-differences design comparing Tesla-related ventures with other startups before and after the pledge. We find that Tesla-related ventures experienced a significant decline in successful exit rates after Tesla’s patent pledge. The result is robust to rich fixed effects and alternative specifications. Additional moderation analyses suggest that the effect varies across investor and venture characteristics, pointing to several possible mechanisms. One interpretation is tha