Representation and the Direction of Innovation: Evidence from U.S. Patent Applications

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters examining participation in and the direction of innovation in the United States. Chapter 1 details the creation of a novel data set constructed using publicly available data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office with which I am able to explore individual inventors’ complete patent application histories. Chapter 2 examines the gender gap in innovation by studying male and female inventors’ differential responsiveness to rejections in the patent process. Chapter 3 uses the data constructed in Chapter 1 to study variation in application behavior and the innovative trajectories of male and female patent applicants./nChapter 1 considers how individual inventors’ patenting activities have traditionally been measured in prior work and describes the construction of a more comprehensive data set. Prior research has documented repeat patenters as those who receive more than one patent. However, the lack of data that tracks all patenting activity, including ungranted and abandoned applications, has made it impossible to measure the effects of applications that do not convert to patents, but that still may represent meaningful innovative contributions. I detail the construction of a novel, open-access dataset that tracks inventors and identifies all patent applications and granted patents from individuals from 2001 onwards. I identify 2.4 million unique inventors across 4.6 million applications. I describe this data and outline future directions for research./nChapter 2, coathored with Abhay Aneja and Oren Reshef, documents that over 86% of granted patents in the United States include no female inventors and asks: why are women underrepresented in innovation? We argue that differences in responses to early rejections between men and women are a significant contributor to the gender disparity in innovation. We evaluate the prosecution and outcomes of almost one million patent applications in the United States from 2001 through 2012 and leverage variation in patent examiners’ probabilities of rejecting applications to employ a quasi-experimental instrumental variables approach. Our results show that applications from women are less likely to continue in the patent process after receiving an early rejection. Roughly half of the overall gender gap in awarded patents during this period can be accounted for by the differential propensity of women to abandon applications./nWe identify that teams with a significant female presence are 4.4-7.2 percentage points less likely to receive a patent if they receive a rejection early in the application process. The gender gap in responsiveness to rejection widens as the presence of women on inventor teams increases, indicating that the intensive margin of female representation affects how patenting teams respond to rejection. We explore why this may be the case and provide evidence that the gender gap in outcomes is reduced for applications that use attorneys and are affiliated with firms, consistent with a role for information and institutional support in mitigating gender disparities. These results suggest that female innovators’ ideas are underleveraged, with negative implications for gender differences in entrepreneurship and the broader landscape of innovation./nIn Chapter 3, I leverage the data constructed in Chapter 1 to study how male and female patent applicants’ trajectories differ. Specifically, I evaluate the effect of prior experience on male and female inventors’ subsequent patent applications. I identify that female inventors are significantly more likely than male inventors to explore different technology areas after success in the patent process. Interestingly, this effect is driven by experienced patent applicants as opposed to new patent applicants. I also find that experienced female inventors are more likely to patent across a broad set of technology areas than similarly experienced male inventors./nThrough this work, I identify a significant piece of the puzzle of women’s underrepresentation in patenting and implications for the landscape of innovation. I quantify the magnitude of gender differences in innovation contexts and identify the mechanisms by which these arise, along with opportunities for interventions to reduce performance gaps. This dissertation represents a step towards better understanding gender variation in participation in innovation, which is essential in order to develop solutions that promote gender equity in innovative fields.

Advisor: Stuart, Toby
Nagaraj, Abhishek