The Rise of American Ingenuity: Innovation and Inventors of the Golden Age

Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby and Tom Nicholas

No 23047, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We examine the golden age of U.S. innovation by undertaking a major data collection exercise linking historical U.S. patents to state and county-level aggregates and matching inventors to Federal Censuses between 1880 and 1940. We identify a causal relationship between patented inventions and long-run economic growth and outline a basic framework for analyzing key macro and micro-level determinants. We find a positive relationship between innovation and drivers of regional performance including population density, financial development and geographic connectedness. We also explore the impact of social structure measured by slavery and religion. We then profile the characteristics of inventors and their life cycle finding that inventors were highly educated, positively selected through exit early in their careers, made time allocation decisions such as delayed marriage, and tended to migrate to places that were conducive to innovation. Father's income was positively correlated with becoming an inventor, though not when controlling for the child's education. We show there were strong financial returns to technological development. Finally, we document an inverted-U shaped relationship between inequality and innovation but also show that innovative places tended to be more socially mobile. Our new data help to address important questions related to innovation and long-run growth dynamics.

JEL-codes: N11 N12 O31 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his, nep-ino and nep-tid
Note: DAE EFG PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (102)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23047.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Rise of American Ingenuity: Innovation and Inventors of the Golden Age (2017)
Working Paper: The Rise of American Ingenuity: Innovation and Inventors of the Golden Age (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23047

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23047

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().