Abstract Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business
competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech …

US invention has become increasingly concentrated around major tech centers since the
1970s, with implications for how much cities across the country share in concomitant local …

I provide a primer on six recent large‐scale historical patent data sets for use in innovation
research. I discuss how each data set is constructed, the types of patent information included …

How important is access to patent documents for subsequent innovation? We examine the
expansion of the USPTO Patent Library system after 1975. Patent libraries provided access …

Researchers use microdata to study the economic development of the United States and the
causal effects of historical policies. Much of this research focuses on county-and state-level …

Local governments spend over 12billionannuallyfundingtheoperationof15,
427publiclibrariesintheUnitedStates,yetweknowlittleabouttheireffects.Weusedatadescribingthenearuniverseofpu …

The geography of breakthrough invention in the US–defined as the spatial distribution of the
production of patents that are both novel and impactful–underwent three broad changes …

The past century witnessed a dramatic improvement in public health, the rise of modern
medicine, and the transformation of the hospital from a fringe institution to one essential to …

Abstract Between 1890 and 1921, Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of 1,618 public
libraries in cities and towns across the United States. I link these library construction grants …

Pre-industrial European academic institutions are often assumed to have been flawed, with
misallocated resources and talent. In this paper, I examine the role of academies, dynamic …