Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation
Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation
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DOI：
10.3386/w24062
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发表时间：
2017-11
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Alex Bell;Raj Chetty;Xavier Jaravel;Neviana Petkova;J. Van Reenen
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文献类型：
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作者：
Alex Bell;Raj Chetty;Xavier Jaravel;Neviana Petkova;J. Van Reenen
我们通过使用与税收记录相关的专利记录中120万名发明家的去识别数据，描述了决定谁在美国成为发明家的因素。我们建立了三组结果。首先，来自高收入（前1%）家庭的孩子成为发明家的可能性是来自中低收入家庭的孩子的10倍。种族和性别之间也存在同样巨大的差距。以儿童早期的测试成绩衡量的先天能力差异，对这些差距的解释相对较少。第二，儿童时期接触创新对儿童成为发明家的倾向有显著的因果影响。在某个特定技术类别的创新率较高的社区或家庭中长大，会导致在同一技术类别申请专利的可能性更高。这些接触效应是有性别差异的：如果女孩成长的地区有更多的女性发明家，她们就更有可能成为某一特定技术班级的发明家。第三，以引用次数衡量，发明的经济回报极不平衡，而且与它们的科学影响高度相关。与曝光效应的重要性相一致，与职业选择的标准模式相反，妇女和弱势青年在高影响力发明家中的代表性不足，就像她们在整个发明家中的代表性不足一样。我们开发了一个简单的发明家职业生涯模型，与这些实证结果相匹配。该模型表明，在儿童时期增加对创新的接触可能比增加对创新的财政激励（例如通过降低税率）产生更大的影响。特别是，有许多“失去的爱因斯坦”——如果他们接触到创新，就会有非常有影响力的发明。
We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in America by using de-identified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records. We establish three sets of results. First, children from high-income (top 1%) families are ten times as likely to become inventors as those from below-median income families. There are similarly large gaps by race and gender. Differences in innate ability, as measured by test scores in early childhood, explain relatively little of these gaps. Second, exposure to innovation during childhood has significant causal effects on children's propensities to become inventors. Growing up in a neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology class leads to a higher probability of patenting in exactly the same technology class. These exposure effects are gender-specific: girls are more likely to become inventors in a particular technology class if they grow up in an area with more female inventors in that technology class. Third, the financial returns to inventions are extremely skewed and highly correlated with their scientific impact, as measured by citations. Consistent with the importance of exposure effects and contrary to standard models of career selection, women and disadvantaged youth are as under-represented among high-impact inventors as they are among inventors as a whole. We develop a simple model of inventors' careers that matches these empirical results. The model implies that increasing exposure to innovation in childhood may have larger impacts on innovation than increasing the financial incentives to innovate, for instance by reducing tax rates. In particular, there are many "lost Einsteins" - individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation.