Collaborative Research: The financial impact of inventor migration on individuals and regions

硅谷为美国经济贡献了越来越多的创新和创业精神。如果这种趋势继续下去，美国的区域创新不平等几乎肯定会加剧。国家的大部分地区？如果创新只集中在少数几个地区，美国潜在的科学人才队伍可能无法发展，或者可能被忽视。本项目考察了工程师在区域内和区域间的流动如何促进这一过程。对于硅谷在创业和经济上的崛起，人们给出了许多解释，其中之一是它的高速劳动力市场，在这里，工人对自己的职业比对任何特定公司都更忠诚。然而，企业显然希望留住自己的员工，一方面是为了收回培训投资，另一方面是为了阻止他们帮助竞争对手。本研究将探讨区域内流动如何影响企业创新，同时也考虑这些员工是否可以更好地创办自己的公司。一个地区的整体福利也可能受益于流动性的增加。区域间的流动性也影响着区域的创新能力。创新集中在高科技地区，如果最好的发明家迁移，可能会增加区域创新不平等。移民不仅在地区之间，而且在公司之间也可能影响个人层面的不平等。员工可能会从对雇主的忠诚中获利，因为他们会通过发展公司特有的人力资本而变得独特有价值，如果他们离开公司去另一个组织就会失去这些人力资本，但对员工来说，在目前公司之外探索劳动力市场可能更具经济吸引力。本研究的主要数据将是专利持有人。该项目将首先根据1976年至2019年的美国专利，建立一个数据库，其中包含所有在公司和地区之间移动的发明家。尽管这看起来很简单，但缺乏唯一标识符以及专利记录的其他微妙之处使得确定移动变得不简单。例如，发明人有时将专利转让给多家公司，或者在一组交替的公司提交一系列专利，这样看起来发明人在两个雇主之间来回跳动。接下来，该项目将分析发明家地区迁移的趋势，并评估这种迁移对生产率和不平等的影响。由于流动不是随机的，因此会利用雇佣法的变化、自然灾害等外部因素。这些结果数据库还将支持美国所有县和时间段的发明家移动性的动态可视化。流动性还将用热图来说明，热图说明了同一时期和技术类别的美国所有县的发明家的净损失和收益。最终，政策制定者将能够可视化和检查区域创新不平等的趋势，并确定哪些技术领域正在成为区域集中与分散。所有数据将向公众公开。

Silicon Valley contributes an increasingly disproportionate amount of innovation and entrepreneurship to the U.S. economy.  If this trend continues, regional innovation inequality in the United States will almost certainly be exacerbated. Large segments of the nation?s potential scientific workforce might fail to develop, or might be overlooked, if innovation is concentrated only in a few regions. This project examines how the intra and inter-regional mobility of engineers contributes to this process.  Among the many explanations given for the rise of Silicon Valley to entrepreneurial and economic prominence is its high-velocity labor market, in which workers are more loyal to their profession than to any particular firm. However, companies clearly want to retain their employees, both to recoup training investments and also to block them from aiding rivals. This study will examine how intra-regional mobility influences firm innovativeness, while also considering whether those employees might have done better to start their own firm.  A region's overall welfare may also benefit from increased mobility.  Inter-regional mobility also affects the innovativeness of regions.  Concentration of innovation in a high tech region, if the best inventors migrate, will likely increase regional innovative inequality.  Migration not only between regions but also between firms may affect inequality at the individual level as well. Workers may profit from loyalty to their employer in that they become uniquely valuable by developing firm-specific human capital, which would be lost if they left for another organization, but it may prove more financially attractive for workers to explore the labor market outside their current firm.  The primary data for this study will be patent holders. The project will first curate a database of all inventor moves between firms and regions, based on U.S. patents from 1976-2019. Although such might seem straightforward, lack of unique identifiers as well as other subtleties of patent records render the determination of moves non-trivial. For example, inventors sometimes assign patents to multiple firms or file a series of patents at a set of alternating firms such that it appears the inventor is bouncing and forth between two employers. Next, the project will analyze trends in the regional migration of inventors and assess the impact on productivity and inequality of such moves. Given that moves are not random, outside factors influencing mobility such as changes in employment laws and natural disasters will be utilized. These resulting databases will also support dynamic visualization of inventor mobility across all U.S. counties and time periods. Mobility will also be illustrated with heat maps, illustrating net losses and gains of inventors across all U.S. counties of the same time period and technology category. Ultimately, policymakers will be able to visualize and inspect trends in regional innovation inequality and determine which technical fields are becoming regionally concentrated vs. dispersed. All data will be made available to the public.