Intangible assets and foreign ownership in international joint ventures: The moderating role of related and unrelated industrial agglomeration

When multinational enterprises form international joint ventures (IJVs) with local firms, the knowledge exchange between the two can expose foreign firms’ intangible assets to local competitors. We study how foreign ownership is used to manage knowledge leakage and how local industrial structures moderate the relationship between intangible assets and foreign ownership. Using a dataset of 25,447 IJVs in China, our results reveal that foreign ownership rises with the increase in intangible assets in IJVs. Related variety further enhances this relationship, whereas unrelated variety has a positive moderating effect only when foreign ownership is within a certain range.