Nature Versus Nurture in the Propensity to Innovate

A colleague pointed me to a paper today that I wanted to share. NBER researchers have managed to tie patent inventor data to tax returns to test scores in order to show who is likely to be an inventor on a patent. The study makes some intuitive and nonintuitive findings. The paper, by Alexander M. Bell (Harvard Econ), Raj Chetty (Stanford Econ), Xavier Jaravel (LSE), Neviana Petkova (U.S. Treasury), and John Van Reenen (MIT Econ), is here:We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in America by using de-identified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records. We establish three sets of results. First, children from high-income (top 1%) families are ten times as likely to become inventors as those from below-median income families. There are similarly large gaps by race and gender. Differences in innate ability, as measured by test scores in early childhood, explain relatively little of these gaps. Second, exposure to innovation…

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