Social push and the direction of innovation

Elias Einio, Josh Feng and Xavier Jaravel

POID Working Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Innovators are intrinsically-motivated individuals who use ideas to create new goods and services. This raises the possibility that their social backgrounds may affect the direction of their innovative activity. Consistent with this "social push" channel, we document that innovators create products that are more likely to be purchased by customers similar to them along observable dimensions including gender, age, and socioeconomic status, both across and within detailed industries. Next, we provide causal evidence that social experience affects the direction of a person's innovative activity. Specifically, being exposed to peers from a lower-income group increases an entrepreneur's propensity to create necessity products, without affecting her rates of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial income. We incorporate this channel into a general equilibrium model to assess its implications for cost-of-living inequality and long-run growth when there is unequal access to the innovation system.

Keywords: innovators social background; social push (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-sbm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://poid.lse.ac.uk/textonly/publications/downloads/poidwp036.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cep:poidwp:036

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in POID Working Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().