The Social Origins of Inventors

Ufuk Akcigit, Philippe Aghion, Otto Toivanen and Ari Hyytinen

No 12496, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: In this paper we merge three datasets - individual income data, patenting data, and IQ data - to analyze the determinants of an individual's probability of inventing. We find that: (i) parental income matters even after controlling for other background variables and for IQ, yet the estimated impact of parental income is greatly diminished once parental education and the individual's IQ are controlled for; (ii) IQ has both a direct effect on the probability of inventing an indirect impact through education. The effect of IQ is larger for inventors than for medical doctors or lawyers. The impact of IQ is robust to controlling for unobserved family characteristics by focusing on potential inventors with brothers close in age. We also provide evidence on the importance of social family interactions, by looking at biological versus non-biological parents. Finally, we find a positive and significant interaction effect between IQ and father income, which suggests a misallocation of talents to innovation.

Keywords: Inventors; Innovation; Social mobility; Iq; Education; Parental background (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J18 J24 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-lma and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12496 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: The social origins of inventors (2017)
Working Paper: The social origins of inventors (2017)
Working Paper: The Social Origins of Inventors (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:cpr:ceprdp:12496

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12496

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().