The Age of Invention: Matching Inventor Ages to Patents Based on Web-scraped Sources

This paper overviews the data collection procedures and resulting data for inventor ages and associated death dates. We use information about inventors from patents (name and location) and search for age and date of death information from publicly available online web directories and build a scoring...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:NBER Working Paper Series 2021-05
Main Authors: Kaltenberg, Mary, Jaffe, Adam B, Lachman, Margie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Economic theory
Inventors
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper overviews the data collection procedures and resulting data for inventor ages and associated death dates. We use information about inventors from patents (name and location) and search for age and date of death information from publicly available online web directories and build a scoring system to indicate the quality of information that we collect. After applying a variety of heuristics and robustness checks, we are confident of 1,508,676 inventor ages associated with patents granted between 1976 and 2018. We also find the death dates of 206,589 inventors, though we are not as confident of the accuracy of the death information. The datasets and associated replication files are freely available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YRLSKU
ISSN:0898-2937
DOI:10.3386/w28768