Previous literature has attributed differences in individuals' inventive productivity to a range of environmental, organizational and individual traits. However, the behavior of individuals with different inventive productivity has not been empirically explored in detail. Based on interviews...

This paper shows that inventors with an early patenting success have a higher inventive productivity during their remaining career. We use European patent data for a period of 32 years for 1240 German inventors. The patent data are linked with survey data that provide information on an extensive...

Patent protection was introduced for plant biotechnology in the United States in 1985, and it affected crops differentially depending on their reproductive structures. Exploiting this unique feature of plant physiology and a new dataset of crop-specific technology development, I find that the...

We show that the acquisition of a startup inventor's first patent has a negative effect on the subsequent productivity of the patent's inventor, leading to 6.7 fewer patents being granted to the inventor over five years. This effect is not due to the inventor focusing on high-quality...