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

Mary Kaltenberg, Adam Jaffe and Margie Lachman

No 28768, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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

JEL-codes: O31 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-05
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