We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability ("nature") vs. environment ("nurture"). Using de-identified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records, we first show that children's chances of becoming inventors vary sharply with characteristics at birth, such as their race, gender, and parents' socioeconomic class. For example, children from high-income (top 1%) families are ten times as likely to become inventors as those from below-median income families. These gaps persist even among children with similar math test scores in early childhoodwhich are highly predictive of innovation ratessuggesting that the gaps may be driven by differences in environment rather than abilities to innovate. We then directly establish the importance of environment by showing that exposure to innovation during childhood has significant causal effects on children's propensities to invent. Children whose families move to a high-innovation area when they are young are more likely to become inventors. These exposure effects are technology-class and gender specific. Children who grow up in a neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology class are more likely to patent in exactly the same class. Girls are more likely to invent in a particular class if they grow up in an area with more women (but not men) who invent in that class. These gender-and technology class-specific exposure effects are more likely to be driven by narrow mechanisms such as role model or network effects than factors that only affect general human capital accumulation, such as the quality of schools. Consistent with the importance of exposure effects in career selection, women and disadvantaged youth are as under-represented among highimpact inventors as they are among inventors as a whole. These findings suggest that there are many "lost Einsteins" -individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation in childhood -especially among women, minorities, and children from low-income families.

This article analyzes how patent-induced shocks to labor productivity propagate into worker compensation using a new linkage of U.S. patent applications to U.S. business and worker tax records. We infer the causal effects of patent allowances by comparing firms whose patent applications were initially allowed to those whose patent applications were initially rejected. To identify patents that are ex ante valuable, we extrapolate the excess stock return estimates of Kogan et al. (2017) to the full set of accepted and rejected patent applications based on predetermined firm and patent application characteristics. An initial allowance of an ex ante valuable patent generates substantial increases in firm productivity and worker compensation. By contrast, initial allowances of lower ex ante value patents yield no detectable effects on firm outcomes. Patent allowances lead firms to increase employment, but entry wages and workforce composition are insensitive to patent decisions. On average, workers capture roughly 30 cents of every dollar of patent-induced surplus in higher earnings. This share is roughly twice as high among workers present since the year of application. These earnings effects are concentrated among men and workers in the top half of the earnings distribution and are paired with corresponding improvements in worker retention among these groups. We interpret these earnings responses as reflecting the capture of economic rents by senior workers, who are most costly for innovative firms to replace.

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 during childhood has significant causal effects on children's propensities to become inventors. Growing up in a neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology class leads to a higher probability of patenting in exactly the same technology class. These exposure effects are gender-specific: girls are more likely to become inventors in a particular technology class if they grow up in an area with more female inventors in that technology class. Third, the financial returns to inventions are extremely skewed and highly correlated with their scientific impact, as measured by citations. Consistent with the importance of exposure effects and contrary to standard models of career selection, women and disadvantaged youth are as under-represented among highimpact inventors as they are among inventors as a whole. We develop a simple model of inventors' careers that matches these empirical results. The model implies that increasing exposure to innovation in childhood may have larger impacts on innovation than increasing the financial incentives to innovate, for instance by cutting tax rates. In particular, there are many "lost Einsteins" -individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation.Keywords: inventor, America, innovation This paper was produced as part of the Centre's Growth Programme. The Centre for Economic Performance is financed by the Economic and Social Research Council.A preliminary draft of this paper was previously circulated under the title "The Lifecycle of Inventors". The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Department of the Treasury, or the National Institutes of Health. We would particularly like to thank Philippe Aghion, with whom we started thinking about these issues, for inspiration and many insightful comments. We would like to also All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher nor be issued to the public or circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.Requests for permission to reproduce any article or part of the Working Paper should be sent to the editor at the above address. I IntroductionInnovation is widely viewed as a central driver of economic growth (e.g., Romer 1990, Aghion and Howitt 1992). As a r...

We establish the importance of team-specific capital in the typical inventor's career. Using administrative tax and patent data for the population of US patent inventors from 1996 to 2012, we find that an inventor's premature death causes a large and long-lasting decline in their co-inventor's earnings and citation-weighted patents (-4% and -15% after 8 years, respectively). After ruling out firm disruption, network effects and top-down spillovers as main channels, we show that the effect is driven by close-knit teams and that team-specific capital largely results from an "experience" component increasing collaboration value over time. JEL codes: O31, O32, J24, J30, J41 deaths as a source of identification is becoming increasingly common (Jones and Olken (2005); Bennedsen et al. (2007); Azoulay, Graff Zivin and Wang (2010); Nguyen and Nielsen (2010); Oettl (2012); Becker and Hvide (2016); Fadlon and Nielsen (2015); Isen (2013)) and several papers have investigated peer effects in specific areas of science: Agrawal, Kapur and McHale (2008);Borjas and Doran (2012, 2015); Oettl (2012); Waldinger (2010, 2011). Our paper is the first to study collaboration effects by looking at both earnings and innovation outcomes. Our results are consistent with the findings that direct collaborators matter, as in Azoulay, Graff Zivin and Wang (2010) and Borjas and Doran (2015) , but also that there are no wider firm-specific or university-specific spillovers, as in Waldinger (2011). We estimate the differential spillover effect of an inventor on various peer groups (co-inventors, coworkers, and second-degree connections in the co-inventor networks) using the same research design, which allows us to establish the unique importance of co-inventors in an inventor's career. Other related strands of literature study

No abstract