Adam Jaffe

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 Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

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