Data and Code for: "How Do Institutions of Higher Education Affect Local Invention? Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges"

This is data and code for "How Do Institutions of Higher Education Affect Local Invention? Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges." In this project, I use narrative historical data on site selection decisions for a subset of U.S. colleges to identify "runner-up" locations that were strongly considered to become the sites of new colleges. Using runner-up counties as counterfactuals in a difference-in-difference model, I find that establishing a college causes 62% more patents per year. Linking patents to novel college yearbook data reveal that only 12% of patents in a college's county came from that college’s alumni or faculty. I find only small differences in patenting between establishing colleges and establishing other institutions, as well as between colleges with different focuses on technical fields.