Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the US but also in Finland which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find that: (i) the positive association between parental income...

This paper studies the effects of university STEM education on innovation and labor market outcomes by exploiting a change in enrollment requirements in Italian STEM majors. University-level scientific education had two direct effects on the development of patents by students who had acquired a...

This paper develops an occupation-level measure of Capital-Embodied Innovation (CEI) by matching patents with capital goods based on their text similarity. The impact of CEI on labor demand is heterogeneous, depending on the similarity between capital and occupational tasks. Specifically, CEI...

Non-compete agreements help protect business investments by restricting worker mobility, thereby increasing firm incentives to invest. Yet, they could damage the efficacy of innovation investments that crucially rest on employee incentives. Exploiting staggered reforms of state non-compete...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

In this paper we investigate the nexus between firm labor diversity and innovation using a linked employer-employee data from Denmark. Specifically, exploiting information retrieved from this comprehensive database and implementing proper instrumental variable strategies, we are able to identify...

The paper studies the patent productivity of scientists over their life cycle. The incentives for patenting and for publishing are compared and how they shape life cycle productivity. In most empirical studies, publication productivity decreases at the end of the scientific career. In contrast,...