Do trademarks assist global fabless manufacturing?

We test for evidence that trademark families are being used by fabless manufactures to support their intangible business model. A fabless manufacturer is a business that designs, researches, develops, retails and/or markets a product but does not assemble or fabricate. We show that variation in international trademarking activity, after controlling for exports and outward FDI, conforms well to product complexity measures and existing evidence on the growth of both fabless manufacturing and production fragmentation in the USA (by State and by industry).