Immigration and Inventor Productivity

The dataset contains information on inventors listed in patent application filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It covers the years 1978 to 2012. The file ptc_dis_inv.txt contains unique identifiers for the disambiguated inventors (inv_id), and two different identifiers for the patent applications: 'ia_number', which is the international application number, and 'appln_id’, which allows to establish a link with the EPO's PATSTAT database. The file also contains the variable 'origin_name', which records the original name of the inventor as it appears on the PCT patent document, information regarding the year of the patent application (fil_year) and the variable geo_id, which allows performing a (m:1) matching with the file ptc_geo_info.txt. The file ptc_geo_info.txt contains geographical information related to the nationality as well as the residence of the inventors. As for the inventor’s residence, when available, the file reports the following information: country, latitude, longitude, region and city. (NB: there are 19,868 PCT patents without information on the appln_id and 349,777 inventors without any information regarding their nationality and residence) A detailed description of the data can be found in Pellegrino, Penner, Piguet & de Rassenfosse (2019): Immigration and Inventor Productivity, available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3334085