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- January 2021
- Article
Commuting and Innovation: Are Closer Inventors More Productive?
By: Hongyu Xiao, Andy Wu and Jaeho Kim
We estimate the causal effect of workplace–home commuting distance on inventor productivity. We construct a novel panel of U.S. inventors with precisely measured workplace–home distances and inventor-level productivity. Our identification strategy exploits firm office...
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- November 2020
- Article
Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations
By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Hillel Rapoport
We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 60 percent more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Research Subsidy Spillovers, Two Ways
By: Kyle Myers and Lauren Lanahan
We study how the outputs of research spill over technological and geographic space in the context of the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research program. We infer input-output links using text analyses and identify the marginal costs of producing patents using...
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- May 2020
- Article
Inventor Gender and the Direction of Invention
By: Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila and John-Paul Ferguson
We study whether increasing the share of female inventors leads to more biomedical inventions that focus on the needs of women. After accounting for detailed disease-technology, disease-year, and technology-year fixed effects, we find that a 10 percentage point...
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- March 2020
- Article
Organizing Knowledge Production Teams Within Firms for Innovation
By: Vikas A. Aggarwal, David H. Hsu and Andy Wu
How should firms organize their pool of inventive human capital for firm-level innovation? While access to diverse knowledge may aid knowledge recombination, which can facilitate innovation, prior literature has focused primarily on one way of achieving that: diversity...
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- 2020
- Chapter
Immigrant Networking and Collaboration: Survey Evidence from CIC
By: William R. Kerr and Sari Pekkala Kerr
Networking and the giving and receiving of advice outside of one's own firm are important features of entrepreneurship and innovation. We study how immigrants and natives utilize the potential networking opportunities provided by CIC, formerly known as the Cambridge...
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- Article
Risk Attitudes and Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs and Venture Team Members
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr and Margaret Dalton
Personality distinctions between entrepreneurs, nonfounder CEOs/leaders, and inventor employees have received limited attention, especially in innovative settings where they are working together. We surveyed these groups, along with other employees of innovative firms,...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Female Inventors and Inventions
By: Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila and John-Paul Ferguson
Has the increase in female medical researchers led to more medical advances for women? In this paper, we investigate if the gender of inventors shapes their types of inventions. Using data on the universe of U.S. biomedical patents, we find that patents with women...
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Keywords:
Innovation;
Biomedical Research;
Innovation and Invention;
Diversity;
Gender;
Research;
Health;
United States
- February 2019
- Article
The Ethnic Migrant Inventor Effect: Codification and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Do Yoon Kim
Ethnic migrant inventors may differ from locals in terms of the knowledge they bring to host firms. We study the role of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors in cross-border transfer of knowledge previously locked within the cultural context of their home regions....
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Keywords:
Skilled Migration;
Ethnic Migration;
First-generation Migrant;
Cultural Context;
Knowledge Flows;
Knowledge Reuse;
Knowledge Recombination;
Recombinant Creation;
H1b Visas;
Knowledge Sharing;
Knowledge Use and Leverage;
Knowledge Dissemination;
Immigration;
Ethnicity;
Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues
- 2019
- Working Paper
Immigrant Networking and Collaboration: Survey Evidence from CIC
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
Networking and the giving and receiving of advice outside of one’s own firm are important features of entrepreneurship and innovation. We study how immigrants and natives utilize the potential networking opportunities provided by CIC, formerly known as the Cambridge...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Timothy McQuade and Beatriz Pousada
We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing the first five digits of...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century
By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas and Stefanie Stantcheva
This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the 20th century. We use three new datasets: a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920; a dataset of the employment, location, and patents of firms...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting
By: Michael Webb, Nick Short, Nicholas Bloom and Josh Lerner
Patenting in software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has grown rapidly in recent years. Such patents are acquired primarily by large U.S. technology firms such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, and HP, as well as by Japanese multinationals such as Sony, Canon,...
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- July 2018
- Article
Global Collaborative Patents
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new...
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- February 2018
- Article
Patent Publication and the Market for Ideas
By: Deepak Hegde and Hong Luo
In this paper, we study the effect of invention disclosure through patent publication on the market for ideas. We do so by analyzing the effects of the American Inventor's Protection Act of 1999 (AIPA)—which required U.S. patent applications to be published 18 months...
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- July 2017 (Revised July 2020)
- Course Overview Note
Public Entrepreneurship
By: Mitchell Weiss
This course is rooted in the belief that there is a large opportunity for creating value and solving large public problems if there are more inventors and builders inside government and more inventors and builders outside government, building for it. The course was...
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- 2017
- Article
High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr, Çağlar Özden and Christopher Parsons
This paper reviews recent research regarding high-skilled migration. We adopt a data-driven perspective, bringing together and describing several ongoing research streams that range from the construction of global migration databases, to the legal codification of...
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- May 2017
- Article
Immigration and the Rise of American Ingenuity
By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby and Tom Nicholas
We build on the analysis in Akcigit, Grigsby, and Nicholas (2017) by using U.S. patent and census data to examine the relationship between immigration and innovation. We construct a measure of foreign born expertise and show that technology areas where immigrant...
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- April 2017
- Case
The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Sarah Mehta
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal government agency responsible for evaluating and granting patents and trademarks. In 2015, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners who granted nearly 300,000 patents to inventors. As of April...
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Keywords:
Machine Learning;
Telework;
Collaborating With Unions;
Human Resources;
Recruitment;
Retention;
Intellectual Property;
Copyright;
Patents;
Trademarks;
Knowledge Sharing;
Technology Adoption;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Performance Productivity;
Performance Improvement;
District of Columbia
- April 2017
- Article
Prizes, Patents and the Search for Longitude
By: M. Diane Burton and Tom Nicholas
The 1714 Longitude Act created the Board of Longitude to administer a large monetary prize and progress payments for the precise determination of a ship’s longitude. However, the prize did not prohibit patenting. We use a new dataset of marine chronometer inventors to...
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