Knowledge Access: The Effects of Carnegie Libraries on Innovation

Berkes, Enrico; Nencka, Peter

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3629299

Cited by 22 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…As measures of library usage and resources, we analyze the number of children who attend library-based events, the total circulation of a library's collections, the circulation of children's material, the number of visits, the total stock of books, and annual operating expenses. 7…”

Section: Library Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Zillow calls these forecasts 'Zestimates.' Zillow then calculates the index for a zip code as the value-weighted average Zestimate in the area, excluding houses that 7 There is no individual-level library usage information in these data. This means that we do not observe the number of unique users of library services, for example.…”

Section: Housing Price Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Note that Jackson and Mackevicius (2021) equivalently calculate average e ects of school capital spending by averaging over all available test subjects. We de ne per-student counts using the sum of all students in a particular district-year in grades[3][4][5][6][7][8] …”

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confidence: 99%

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The Returns to Public Library Investment

Gilpin

Karger

Nencka

2021

Self Cite

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Local governments spend over 12 billion dollars annually funding the operation of 17,000 public libraries in the United States, yet we know little about their e ects. We use data describing the near-universe of public libraries to show that public library investment increases children's attendance at library events by 18%, children's checkouts of items by 21%, and library visits by 21%. Increases in library use translate into improved test scores in nearby school districts: a $1,000 or greater per-student capital investment in local public libraries increases reading test scores by 0.02 standard deviations and has no e ects on math test scores.

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Section: Library Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Housing Price Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Returns to Public Library Investment

Gilpin

Karger

Nencka

2021

Self Cite

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“…The use of historical data provides more opportunities to exploit natural experiments as well as to track the long term effects of innovation policies. To list just a few examples making use of historical patents, Rosenberg and Nelson (1994), Mowery et al (2001), Mowery and Sampat (2001), Sampat (2006), and Andrews (2020b) explore the changing role of universities in patenting throughout the 20th century; Acemoglu et al (2016) and Berkes and Nencka (2020) study the effect of other institutions such as post offices and libraries on invention; Furman and MacGarvie (2007, 2009) study the role of new organizational forms on patenting in the early pharmaceutical industry; Trajtenberg (1990) examines computed tomography scanner patents dating to the early 1970s to document the correlation between patent citations and patent value; Moser (2005, 2011) uses data from historical World Fairs to study the effect of patent protection on the rate and direction of invention; Lampe and Moser (2010, 2012, 2013) use the early sewing machine industry to illustrate the effects of patent pools; and Andrews (2020a) exploits alcohol prohibition in the first half of the 20th century to investigate the importance of informal social interactions for invention. In all of these studies, the results are only as credible as the patent data used.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical patent data: A practitioner's guide

Andrews

2021

Economics Manag Strategy

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I provide a primer on six recent large‐scale historical patent data sets for use in innovation research. I discuss how each data set is constructed, the types of patent information included in each, and the quality and completeness of each. Throughout, I emphasize when our knowledge of the history of invention is dependent on the data source used and provide recommendations about which data set is most likely to be best for different contexts. Overall, these data sets paint a remarkably consistent picture of the history of U.S. invention. When the data sets do disagree, these differences tend to be minor, although I highlight some important exceptions. I further describe several “niche” historical patent data sets that allow researchers to study institutional contexts that cannot be studied using modern data. Finally, I discuss features of patent data that are not available for the historical patents but are available for modern patents.

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“…Kevane andSundstrom (2014, 2016) measure the expansion of public libraries across the United States in the early 1900s and use aggregated data to argue that public libraries had no effect on county-level voting behavior. And contemporaneous work by Berkes and Nencka (2019) shows that Carnegie's library construction grants increased patenting activity when compared to towns receiving a grant offer that never materialized. Examining a more recent time period, Bhatt (2010) uses distance to a public library as an instrument for library access and argues that library access increases the amount of time children spend reading, the amount of time parents spend reading to their children, and homework completion rates.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Long-Run Effect of Public Libraries on Children: Evidence from the Early 1900s

Karger¹

2021

Preprint

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Between 1890 and 1921, Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of 1,618 public libraries in cities and towns across the United States. I link these library construction grants to census data and measure the effect of childhood public library access on adult outcomes. Library construction grants increased children's educational attainment by 0.10 years, did not affect wage income, and increased non-wage income by 4%. These income effects are driven by occupational choice. Access to a public library caused children to shift away from occupations like manual labor, factory-work, and mining into safer and more prestigious occupations like farm-ownership, clerical, and technical jobs. I show that compulsory schooling laws had parallel effects on children, increasing educational attainment, non-wage income and occupational prestige without affecting wage income. Economists often rely solely on wage income to measure the returns to education. But public libraries and compulsory schooling laws in the early 1900s increased educational attainment and had positive effects on children's adult labor market outcomes without affecting wage income.

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Knowledge Access: The Effects of Carnegie Libraries on Innovation

Cited by 22 publications

References 35 publications

The Returns to Public Library Investment

The Returns to Public Library Investment

Historical patent data: A practitioner's guide

The Long-Run Effect of Public Libraries on Children: Evidence from the Early 1900s

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