Inventive Activity in the Historical United States
Presented by:
Sarada
School of Business
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
12:00 pm-1:00 pm
Taylor-Hibbard Seminar Room (Rm103)
We match the 1870 - 1940 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents to the correspond- ing U.S. Federal Population Censuses. This provides a rich set of demographic information for a comprehensive dataset of inventors. Using this dataset, we first document that patentees over this seventy year period are more likely to be older, white, male and to have migrated between states. While these patterns hold generally over time, they do so to varying degrees. In particu- lar, we find an increasing share of women inventors while the black share remains constant. We also find that patenting levels tend to be geographically concentrated and present some basic correlates between patenting geography and local demographics. We close with some suggestive evidence on the effects of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) on the rate of black patenting.