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Title: Disruptive innovation and spatial inequality
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2022
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Abstract: Although technological change is widely credited as driving the last two hundred years of economic growth, its role in shaping patterns of inequality remains under-explored. Drawing parallels across two industrial revolutions in the United States, this paper provides new evidence of a relationship between highly disruptive forms of innovation and spatial inequality. Using the universe of patents granted between 1920 and 2010 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Oce, we identify disruptive innovations through their rapid growth, complementarity with other innovations , and widespread use. We then assign more-and less-disruptive innovations to subnational regions in the geography of the U.S. We document three findings that are new to the literature. First, disruptive innovations exhibit distinctive spatial clustering in phases understood to be those in which industrial revolutions reshape the economy; they are increasingly dispersed in other periods. Second, we discover that the ranks of locations that capture the most disruptive innovation are relatively unstable across industrial revolutions. Third, regression estimates suggest a role for disruptive innovation in regulating overall patterns of spatial output and income inequality
Url: http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2211.pdf
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Authors: Kemeny, Tom; Petralia, Sergio; Storper, Michael
Series Title: Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography
Publication Number: 22.11
Institution: Utrecht University
Pages: 1-48
Publisher Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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