John Van Reenan, MIT Sloan School of Management
John Van Reenan, MIT Sloan School of Management
SBBI Seminar: Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation paper joint with Alexander M. Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova)
SBBI Seminar: Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation paper joint with Alexander M. Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova)
08 Mar 201912:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Harvard community only
We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States,
focusing on the role of inventive ability (“nature”) vs. environment (“nurture”).
Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax
records, we first show that children's chances of becoming inventors vary sharply
with characteristics at birth, such as their race, gender, and parents' socioeconomic
class. For example, children from high-income (top 1%) families are ten times as likely
to become inventors as those from below-median income families. These gaps persist
even among children with similar math test scores in early childhood – which are highly
predictive of innovation rates – suggesting that the gaps may be driven by differences
in environment rather than abilities to innovate. We then directly establish the importance
of environment by showing that exposure to innovation during childhood has significant
causal effects on children's propensities to invent. Children whose families move
to a high-innovation area when they are young are more likely to become inventors.
These exposure effects are technology-class and gender specific. Children who grow
up in a neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology
class are more likely to patent in exactly the same class. Girls are more likely to
invent in a particular class if they grow up in an area with more women (but not men)
who invent in that class. These gender- and technology class-specific exposure effects
are more likely to be driven by narrow mechanisms such as role model or network effects
than factors that only affect general human capital accumulation, such as the quality
of schools. Consistent with the importance of exposure effects in career selection,
women and disadvantaged youth are as under-represented among high-impact inventors
as they are among inventors as a whole. These findings suggest that there are many
“lost Einsteins” – individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had
they been exposed to innovation in childhood – especially among women, minorities,
and children from low-income families.