Research Briefs·May 13, 2025

Interactive Research Brief: Measuring the Characteristics and Employment Dynamics of U.S. Inventors

Ufuk Akcigit and Nathan Goldschlag

Innovation is a key driver of economic growth, and understanding the conditions that lead people to invent new technologies can help reduce inequality between groups as well as help spur growth overall. This project aims to facilitate such efforts using a new dataset that links data from the Census Bureau to information on inventors who received patents between 2000 and 2016. The end result is a dataset covering demographic characteristics and employment histories for over 760,000 inventors, from which the authors draw the following insights.

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