150 years of the geography of innovation

Historical patent data: A practitioner's guide

“…This suggests that the HistPat data are attributing patents to too few towns relative to the other data sets, resulting in an artificially high concentration at the town level. The temporal pattern of geographic concentration presented in all three figures and across all four data sets-with a steep decline in concentration until the early 1900s followed by a slight rise until about 1940 and then further declines following World War II-are consistent with the patterns of geographic concentration of patenting documented by Andrews and Whalley (2020), who use a different measure of concentration based on Ellison and Glaeser (1997).…”

“…For this reason, some analyses such as Sarada et al (2019) and Andrews and Whalley (2020) begin after the Civil War.…”

A tale of two cities: Communication, innovation, and divergence

“…But what about the spatial distribution of these innovating activities? In general, R&D activities are more concentrated than manufacturing activities (e.g., Buzard et al., 2017); moreover, both Andrews and Whalley (2021) and Forman and Goldfarb (2021) report a particularly pronounced increase in the geographic concentration of patenting at the US county level starting from the 1990s.…”

“…Following Andrews and Whalley (2021), we measure concentration using Ellison and Glaeser's (1997) “dartboard approach.” This consists in calculating an index of the spatial concentration of innovation intensity by comparing the observed spatial distribution of patents to what it would have been if it was proportional to population distribution 7 . In particular, for each year t and all MSAs n ∈ N , our dartboard innovation intensity concentration index is $$$Concentratio{n}_{t}=\frac{{\sum }_{n=1}^{N}{\left(SharePa{t}_{nt}-SharePo{p}_{nt}\right)}^{2}}{1-{\sum }_{n=1}^{N}SharePo{p}_{nt}^{2}},$$$ where SharePat nt and SharePop nt are, respectively, the shares of patents granted and of population living in area n in year t .…”

History and urban economics

“…Jedwab et al (2022) discuss the rise of medieval cities; Atack et al (2022) focus on urbanization and industrialization in the nineteenth century United States; and Eriksson & Ward (2022) study how settlement patterns during the era of mass immigration to the United States shaped cities. Finally, Andrews & Whalley (2022) look at the geography of innovation in the United States over the past 150 years to show how technological advances drive spatial disparities.…”