Replication Data for: Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation

This dataset contains replication files for "Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation" by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John van Reenen. For more information, see https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/losteinsteins/. A summary of the related publication follows. Innovation is widely viewed as the engine of economic growth. As a result, many policies have been proposed to spur innovation, ranging from tax cuts to investments in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of such policies is unclear because we know relatively little about the factors that induce people to become inventors. Who are America’s most successful inventors and what can we learn from their experiences in designing policies to stimulate innovation? We study the lives of more than one million inventors in the United States using a new de-identified database linking patent records to tax and school district records. Tracking these individuals from birth onward, we identify the key factors that determine who becomes an inventor, as measured by filing a patent.1 Our results shed light on what policies can be most effective in increasing innovation, showing in particular that increasing exposure to innovation among women, minorities, and children from low-income families may have greater potential to spark innovation and growth than traditional approaches such as reducing tax rates. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Department of the Treasury, or the National Institutes of Health.

本数据集包含亚历克斯·贝尔（Alex Bell）、拉吉·切蒂（Raj Chetty）、泽维尔·雅拉维尔（Xavier Jaravel）、内维安娜·佩特科娃（Neviana Petkova）以及约翰·范·里南（John van Reenen）所著《在美国，谁能成为发明家？创新接触的重要性》（Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation）一文的复现文件。更多详细信息可参见https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/losteinsteins/。下文将对该相关研究论文进行概述。

创新被广泛视为经济增长的核心引擎。为此，各界已提出诸多政策以推动创新，涵盖减税、STEM（科学、技术、工程与数学）教育投入等各类举措。遗憾的是，此类政策的有效性尚不明确，因目前我们对促使个体成为发明家的影响因素仍知之甚少。美国最成功的发明家具有哪些特质？我们又能从他们的经历中汲取哪些经验，以设计出促进创新的政策？本研究依托一项将专利记录与税务、学区记录相链接的全新去标识化数据库，对美国超百万名发明家的人生轨迹展开分析。我们从出生起追踪这些个体，以申请专利作为成为发明家的衡量标准¹，识别出决定个体能否成为发明家的关键因素。本研究结果为确定哪些政策对提升创新水平最为有效提供了重要洞见，尤其表明，相较于减税等传统手段，提升女性、少数族裔及低收入家庭儿童接触创新的机会，或能更大程度地激发创新与经济增长。

本文所表达的观点仅代表作者本人，未必反映美国国内税收署（Internal Revenue Service）、美国财政部（U.S. Department of the Treasury）或美国国立卫生研究院（National Institutes of Health）的立场。