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Do tax cuts produce more Einsteins? The impacts of financial incentives vs. exposure to innovation on the supply of inventors
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Do tax cuts produce more Einsteins? The impacts of financial incentives vs. exposure to innovation on the supply of inventors

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  • Alex Bell
  • Raj Chetty
  • Xavier Jaravel
  • Neviana Petkova
  • John Van Reenen

Abstract

Many countries provide financial incentives to spur innovation, ranging from tax incentives to research and development grants. In this paper, we study how such financial incentives affect individuals' decisions to pursue careers in innovation. We _first present empirical evidence on inventors' career trajectories and income distributions using de-identified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records in the U.S. We find that the private returns to innovation are extremely skewed - with the top 1% of inventors collecting more than 22% of total inventors' income - and are highly correlated with their social impact, as measured by citations. Inventors tend to have their most impactful innovations around age 40 and their incomes rise rapidly just before they have high-impact patents. We then build a stylized model of inventor career choice that matches these facts as well as recent evidence that childhood exposure to innovation plays a critical role in determining whether individuals become inventors. The model predicts that financial incentives, such as top income tax reductions, have limited potential to increase aggregate innovation because they only affect individuals who are exposed to innovation and have no impact on the decisions of star inventors, who matter most for aggregate innovation. Importantly, these results hold regardless of whether the private returns to innovation are known at the time of career choice. In contrast, increasing exposure to innovation (e.g., through mentorship programs) could have substantial impacts on innovation by drawing individuals who produce high-impact inventions into the innovation pipeline. Although we do not present direct evidence supporting these model-based predictions, our results call for a more careful assessment of the impacts of financial incentives and a greater focus on alternative policies to increase the supply of inventors.

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  • Alex Bell & Raj Chetty & Xavier Jaravel & Neviana Petkova & John Van Reenen, 2019. "Do tax cuts produce more Einsteins? The impacts of financial incentives vs. exposure to innovation on the supply of inventors," CEP Discussion Papers dp1597, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1597
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    6. Advani, Arun & Koenig, Felix & Pessina, Lorenzo & Summers, Andy, 2020. "Importing Inequality: Immigration and the Top 1 Percent," IZA Discussion Papers 13731, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
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    9. Mendonça, Joana & Reis, Anabela, 2020. "Exploring the mechanisms of gender effects in user innovation," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 155(C).
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    11. Drew Fudenberg & Giacomo Lanzani & Philipp Strack, 2021. "Limit Points of Endogenous Misspecified Learning," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(3), pages 1065-1098, May.
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    inventors; innovation; tax policy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior
    • M2 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Economics
    • O32 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Management of Technological Innovation and R&D
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

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