Abstract:    The institutional environment of intellectual property rights represents a fundamental prerequisite for expediting the innovation-driven development strategy and safeguarding enterprise core competitiveness. From the dual perspectives of intensive and extensive margins, this study devised the "competition-cooperation" dual mechanism theory concerning the optimization of the institutional environment of intellectual property rights. Taking the establishment of intellectual property demonstration cities as a quasi-natural experiment, the staggered DID model was employed to analyze the influence of optimizing the institutional environment of intellectual property rights on enterprise total factor productivity. The research results are as follows: (1) The optimization of the city institutional environment of intellectual property rights significantly boosts the total factor productivity of local listed companies. This policy effect endures over the long term, and its impact amplifies with the continuous refinement of the institutional environment. (2) The optimization of the institutional environment of intellectual property rights could remediate the deficiencies of the market environment. Enterprises in regions with relatively underdeveloped market conditions are more likely to benefit from the enhanced institutional environment of intellectual property rights. (3) The competition effect mechanism test indicated that optimizing the institutional environment of intellectual property rights not only escalates the pressure of inter-enterprise innovation competition but also strengthens the intra-enterprise innovation impetus and capacity. (4) The cooperation effect mechanism test showed that improving the institutional environment of intellectual property rights reduces cooperation costs. However, the effectiveness of innovation cooperation stems from the optimization of the market-oriented allocation of knowledge elements among enterprises rather than their collaborative R&D efforts. The conclusions of this research will provide empirical support for the dual mechanism theory and offer policy suggestions for further refining the institutional environment of intellectual property rights. 

Key words:  institutional environment of intellectual property rights, total factor productivity, staggered DID, competition and cooperation