Abstract: As a new factor of production, the innovation elements cover the elements of technology and data, which are inseparable from the supply of knowledge resources. As a major policy to guide intellectual property protection and promote innovation-driven development, the intellectual property pilot policy is an important measure to protect intellectual property. Based on the data of 262 cities in China from 2008 to 2019, this paper uses the multi-period policy effect estimation method (CSDID) to explore the impact of pilot policies on the efficiency of innovation factor allocation. The findings show that the promotion effect of the intellectual property pilot policy on the efficiency of innovation factor allocation continues to increase. Meanwhile, with the continuous expansion of the scale of pilot cities, the policy effect will gradually increase. For pilot cities established in different batches, there are differences in the promotion effect of intellectual property pilot policies on the efficiency of innovation factor allocation. After a series of robustness tests, the above conclusions are still valid. The mechanism analysis shows that the intellectual property pilot policies can improve the efficiency of innovation factor allocation through attracting the agglomeration of high-tech enterprises and increasing the local technology absorption. The heterogeneity analysis shows that in the cities with higher judicial intensity of intellectual property protection or higher development level of digital government, the promotion effect of intellectual property pilot policies on the efficiency of innovation factor allocation is more significant. Therefore, it is necessary to expand the scale of intellectual property pilot projects, improve and refine the pilot system measures, improve the judicial protection system of intellectual property rights, and strengthen the construction of digital government, so as to achieve the goal of improving the efficiency of innovation factor allocation.

Key words: intellectual property pilot policy, efficiency of innovation factor allocation, multi-period policy effect estimation.