Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of US Inventors

Ufuk Akcigit and Nathan Goldschlag

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: How are inventors allocated in the US economy and does that allocation affect innovative capacity? To answer these questions, we first build a model where an inventor with a new idea has the possibility to work for an entrant or incumbent firm. Strategic considerations encourage the incumbent to hire the inventor, offering higher wages, and then not implement her idea. We then combine data on 760 thousand U.S. inventors with the LEHD data. We find that when an inventor is hired by an incumbent, their earnings increases by 12.6 percent and their innovative output declines by 6 to 11 percent.

Keywords: Inventors; innovation; R&D; firms; dynamism; reallocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2023-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ent, nep-ino, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2023/adrm/ces/CES-WP-23-17.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of US Inventors (2023)
Working Paper: Where Have All the "Creative Talents" Gone? Employment Dynamics of US Inventors (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:23-17

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