As a measure of technological progress, patent data have been extensively used. However, most researches that study patent data from patent offices around the world have been conducted at patent or firm level, not at inventor level because unique inventors cannot be identified across patents and matching inventor names is prone to error. Using unique patent data from Korean Intellectual Property Office that includes unique ID’s for inventors along with information on birth year and gender, we investigate determinants of inventor productivity over the life cycle and the effect of labor mobility on productivity. We ask two particular questions about the effect of labor mobility: (1) Do inventors get more productive after job turnover? (2) Do movers affect co-workers’ productivities in a new firm? |
