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Title: The Demographics of Inventors in the Historical United States
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2016
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Abstract: Who invents? This is a central question to understanding possible barriers to entry in the innovation process. To address it, we match the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents from 1870 to 1940 to the corresponding U.S. Federal Population Censuses. This matching procedure provides a rich set of demographic information on a comprehensive set of inventors. We first document that patentees over this seventy year period are more likely to be older, white, male and to be living in a state other than the one in which they were born. Surprisingly, these patterns are very persistent over space and time though the fraction of women appears to rise slightly. We then attempt to correlate the demographics of patentees with county-level economic and demographic characteristics. Beyond the most obvious such as the number of a particular group in that county, very little explains differences in the demographics of inventors across counties. This suggest that most barriers to entry are persistent over time and very little across space.
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Authors: Sarada, ; Ziebarth, Nicolas L; Andrews, Michael J
Publisher: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Methodology and Data Collection
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