Fortune.com:
American inventors are mostly white men due to opportunity gaps, says Stanford `Lost Einsteins? study
5 December 2017
There’s a lot of inequality affecting where innovation comes from, according to a new study from the Equality of Opportunity Project. “There are very large gaps in innovation by income, race, and gender,” Stanford economist Raj Chetty, who led the research, told The Atlantic. “These gaps don’t seem to be about differences in ability to innovate — they seem directly related to environment.” Chetty, who appeared on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list in 2014, worked with Alex Bell of Harvard, Xavier Jaravel of the London School of Economics, Neviana Petkova of the U.S. Treasury Department, and John Van Reener of MIT to link together millions of anonymized tax records, patents, and test scores in order to create a sample of 1.2 million inventors to study.
Related publications
‘Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation’, Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviano Petkova and John Van Reenen, The Equality of Opportunity Project, December 2017
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_paper.pdf