Publications
Historical Differences in Female-Owned Manufacturing Establishments: The United States, 1850--1880 with Richard Hornbeck, Martin Rotemberg, Anders Humlum (NBER Working Paper) (AEA Papers & Proceedings, 2025)
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Podcast by Marketplace NPR
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We characterize female-owned manufacturing establishments using newly digitized manucripts from the US Census of Manufacturers (1850, 1860, 1870, 1880). Female-owned establishments were smaller than male-owned establishments and had lower capital-to-output ratios, which could reflect more constrained financial access and other distortions. Female-owned establishments employed more women and paid women higher wages, creating a potential cycle between increased female business ownership and increased female labor market participation. Female-owned establishments concentrated in sub-indutries like women's clothing and millinery, which is associated with some but not all of these differences. We also show how women owners differed from other women in the Population Census.
The Interaction of Real and Financial Markets in the Global Economy: What Role Does China Play? (2019), Handbook of Global Financial Markets Transformations, Dependence, and Risk Spillovers, with Sumru Altug and Cem Cakmakli
This chapter examines the role that China plays in the global economy for the propagation of financial uncertainty and volatility. For this purpose, it seeks to measure the interdependence of real and financial markets for a key set of developed markets — the US, the UK, Germany, and Japan — in relation to China. We employ vector auto-regressions (VARs) and make use of generalized impulse responses and variance decompositions to explore the interconnections among these countries. Among other results, we find that the US, Japan, UK, and Germany are highly integrated and form a cluster in terms of financial market volatility and industrial production growth. Surprisingly, we find that financial market volatility in developed countries is strongly affected by volatility shocks emanating from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, attesting to the growing importance of Asian financial markets and real activity in the global economy. By contrast, China has a different story. Chinese financial and production markets are decoupled, and Chinese industrial production growth is mainly determined by its own shocks to domestic conditions.
Working Papers
Property Rights and Innovation Dynamism: The Role of Women Inventors by Ruveyda Gozen (Under Review)
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How do inclusive institutions influence innovation? To what extent exclusion of a group from equal property rights hinder their innovative activities? This paper examines the Married Women’s Property Acts, which granted U.S. women independent property rights during the nineteenth century. Using the universe of patents and a staggered-adoption design, I show that the reforms led to substantial increases in women’s patenting, with effects peaking about a decade after enactment. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that these laws account for at least 30.8% of women’s nineteenth-century innovations. Women’s inventions contributed to the volume of innovations without displacing men and their innovations were equally novel. I further implement triple-difference analysis with men and a neighbor-county border design; both confirm women-specific reform effects rather than broader state trends. Mechanism analyses indicate that the Acts strengthened incentives and relaxed marital constraints: the likelihood of observing married women inventor -including those with children- rises after reform. Women inventors also exhibit higher human capital. Together, these findings show that inclusive institutions can unlock hidden talent and expand the technological frontier.
Quantifying Patenting by Women in the U.S., 1845-1924 with Mike Andrews and Enrico Berkes (Revise & Resubmit, Social Science History)
Patents do not report inventors' gender, requiring researchers to infer the gender of inventors. To conduct these inferences, researchers must make several choices. We show how these researcher choices can affect conclusions about the role of women inventors in the U.S. from 1845 to 1924. More specifically, we compare two automated methods to determine inventor gender for the universe of U.S. patents: inferring gender from inventors' first names and linking inventors to census data. These methods paint similar pictures about aggregate patterns of patenting by women, but often give different predictions about the gender of particular inventors. Both automated methods identify a larger number of patents by women inventors than have previously been identified in the literature. Using the gender inferred by these two methods, we study how the characteristics of patents and inventors differ by gender.
Mapping International Technological Trajectories: Evidence from Multiple Patent Offices over Four Centuries with John Van Reenen, Antonin Bergeaud (Draft Available Upon Request)
We introduce a methodology to measure cross-country trends in innovation capability - "technological trajectories'' and implement this on a rich new patent dataset from 1836 to 2016. Intuitively, trajectories are revealed by a country's sustained increases in patenting across multiple jurisdictions. We first describe the data patterns, showing the relative decline of the UK, the rise of the US and Germany, and then Japan and China. We then econometrically estimate trajectories on (i) the post-1902 period for France, Germany, Japan, the UK and US, and (ii) the post-1960 period for a wider sample of 40 countries. Our trajectories are strongly positively correlated with TFP growth, and also (but less strongly) with the growth of labour productivity and capital intensity. We show that trajectories are predicted by several country attributes such as R&D, human capital, and defence spending.
Brexit and the Falling Innovation Dynamism with Ralf Martin, Esther Boler, and Maxwell Read (Draft Available Upon Request)
We study the effects of Brexit on innovation and international innovation collaborations in the UK. Our key finding is that overall innovation in the UK has declined and patent collaborations with the European Union fell significantly with Brexit. We find similar effects for research projects funded by the EU. Firms involved in collaborative innovation with scientists in the EU see a larger decline in patenting activity compared with other firms. We suggest that our results show a lower-bound estimate of the impact of Brexit on innovation in the UK, and that barriers to innovation could have more serious negative implications for UK economic outcomes in the long run.
We construct a novel establishment-level dataset combining the nineteenth-century U.S. Census of Manufactures (1850–1880), patent records from CUSP, and population census microdata to trace entrepreneurs, their firms, and inventive activity. This is the first paper to provide systematic micro evidence on the returns to innovation the early Second Industrial Revolution era. We examine both the intensive and extensive margin of the retun on patenting. We find that patenting establishments were substantially larger by employing more labor, paying higher wages, holding more capital, and producing more output per worker than comparable non-patenters. They had higher survival ability and were less likely to exit their industry. They also operated in more distinct industries, indicating broader scope rather than mere specialization. Estimating historical establishment-level production functions, we find that innovation primarily raised their physical productivity (TFPQ) rather than price-cost markups. The effects are highly heterogeneous: exit reduction is largest for small establishments, TFPQ gains peak among mid-sized establishments, and markups increase only among the very largest establishments. However, women-owned establishments do not experience any observable and comparable returns.