Research
“Property Rights and Innovation Dynamism: The Role of Women Inventors ” by Ruveyda Gozen (Submitted) (CEP LSE Working Paper)
How do stronger property rights for disadvantaged groups affect innovation? I investigate the impact of strengthened property rights for women on U.S. innovation by analyzing the Married Women’s Property Acts, which granted equal property rights to women starting in 1845 in New York State. I examine the universe of granted patents from 1790 until 1901, exploiting the staggered adoption of the laws over time across states. The strengthening of women’s property rights led to a 40% increase in patenting activity among women in the long run, with effects peaking about a decade after the laws were introduced. Importantly, women's innovations were not of lower quality (as measured by a novelty index based on patent text analysis), and did not generate negative effects on male innovation. Finally, I show that the main mechanism was through higher human capital accumulation among women inventors and innovation incentives, rather than an increase in participation in STEM fields, labor force participation, or relieving financial frictions.
Working Papers
“Historical Differences in Female-Owned Manufacturing Establishments: The United States, 1850--1880” co-authored with Richard Hornbeck, Martin Rotemberg, Anders Humlum (Forthcoming, AEA Papers & Proceedings) (NBER Working Paper)
(Podcast Coverage: Marketplace NPR)
We characterize female-owned manufacturing establishments using newly digitized manuscripts from the US Census of Manufactures (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 con- centrated in sub-industries like women’s clothing and millinery, which is associated with some but not all of these differences. We also show how female owners differed from other women in the Population Census.
“Mapping International Technological Trajectories: Evidence from Multiple Patent Offices over Four Centuries” co-authored with John Van Reenen, Antonin Bergeaud (Draft Available Upon Request)
This paper introduces a methodology to measure a country's trends in innovation capability ("technological trajectories'') by using patent grants across multiple patent offices. A nation with rising relative patents across multiple foreign offices is a useful indicator of improving technological prowess. We apply our new statistical approach to four centuries of patent data, focusing on the last 120 years and four major offices (US, UK, France and Germany). We document several stylized facts. First, the globaization of patenting occurred only after WW2. Second, the technological overtaking of Europe by the US occured around the time of the "Second Industrial Revolution'' in the late 19th century, predating the later overtaking in TFP. Third, we show the post-war re-birth of Germany as a major technological power in the 1950s and Japan in the 1970s. Fourth, we quantify the rise of Chinese innovation in the 2010s and show how a substantial fraction of this was related to their strength in manufacturing. Finally, we quantify technological trajectories for all the major patenting countries over the last 50 years and relate these to policies, institutions and a key explanatory factor: human capital.
“Brexit and the Falling Innovation Dynamism” co-authored with Ralf Martin and Esther Boler (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. On the contrary, trends in collaborations between the UK and other countries, as well as between the EU and other countries, remained stable. We find similar effects for research projects funded by the EU. Overall, our findings suggest a strong correlation between Brexit and the decline in collaborations on innovations and projects within the UK and between the UK and the EU. We suggest that this is a lower-bound estimate of the impact of Brexit on innovation in the UK. Although much focus in the literature has been on immediate effects of Brexit on trade and investment, we suggest that barriers to innovation could have more serious negative implications for UK economic outcomes in the long run.
“Quantifying Patenting by Women in the U.S., 1836-1940” co-authored with Mike Andrews and Enrico Berkes (Draft Available Upon Request)
Who are America’s inventors? While patent documents record inventors’ names and places of residence, they provide no other information about inventors’ identities. Researchers must therefore use several techniques to determine inventor demographics. In this paper, we compare two of the most common methods to identify inventor gender, and then document how these different methods affect our inferences about the prevalence of female inventors and the types of inventions they tend to create. One commonly used method is to use inventors’ first names to infer gender. To operationalize this method, researchers usually rely on pre-existing gender guesser routines that tend to be calibrated using modern data. A second method is to use inventors’ names and locations to link patentees to another data source that includes demographic information, such as linking to the U.S. decennial population censuses. We consider multiple variations for each method, for instance how to handle androgenous names and how to handle cases in which one patent record plausibly links to multiple records in the U.S. census. Different methods produce quite different results for the share of U.S. patents attributed to women inventors, ranging from about 0.7% to more than 7.5%. While the shares differ widely, we verify that different methods are correlated with one another, both across time and across geographic space. We further conduct an audit to determine which women inventors can be identified using first names but not when linking to the census, which women inventors can be identified when linking to the census but not when using first names, and which are identified using both methods. Finally, we measure the extent to which the distribution of patent technology classes, average patent quality, and patent novelty change when using different methods. Throughout, we document several novel empirical facts about patenting by women in the U.S.
Publications:
Handbook of Global Financial Markets Transformations, Dependence, and Risk Spillovers
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.