How Do Institutions of Higher Education Affect Local Invention? Evidence from the Establishment of US Colleges

Michael Andrews

79 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Economic Journal Economic Policy

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Human Resources and Workforce Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis Intellectual Property and Patents

Abstract

I use narrative historical data on site selection decisions for a subset of US colleges to identify runner-up locations that were strongly considered to become the sites of new colleges. Using runner-up counties as counterfactuals in a difference-in-difference model, I find that establishing a college causes 62 percent more patents per year. Linking patents to novel college yearbook data reveals that only 12 percent of patents in a college’s county came from that college’s alumni or faculty. I find only small differences in patenting between establishing colleges and establishing other institutions as well as between colleges with different focuses on technical fields. (JEL I23, N31, N32, N71, N72, O31, O34)

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References

2007The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge 2011Robust Inference With Multiway Clustering 2007Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities 1999Localization of Knowledge and the Mobility of Engineers in Regional Networks 1991The Allocation of Talent: Implications for Growth 2016The Rise and Fall of American Growth 2003Estimating the social return to higher education: evidence from longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional data 2003Mother's Education and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Evidence from College Openings

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