Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to InnovationAlex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John van Reenen No 24062, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: 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. JEL-codes: E0 H0 J0 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published as Alex Bell & Raj Chetty & Xavier Jaravel & Neviana Petkova & John Van Reenen, 2019. "Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation*," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 134(2), pages 647-713. Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24062 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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