We document the generation and the content of the Comprehensive Patent Database (CPDB) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-1990), which is freely available at GESIS https://doi.org/10.7802/2448. The database contains all patents granted in the GDR and published by the Office of...

This document provides clarifications and guidance for researchers seeking to replicate the analyses in our paper. This is important as we identified some items in the published text and the code where additional clarity would be helpful. While none of these affect our substantive conclusions,...

Electric vehicles (EVs) are crucial for cutting transportation emissions, yet the policy drivers of EV innovation remain underexplored. This study analyzes firm-level panel data on EV and battery patents, covering more than 4,000 firms across 19 countries from 2010 to 2021, to assess how these...

How are preferences for innovation formed, and what determines the long-run direction of technological change? This paper shows that early-life exposure to environmental accidents can durably reorient inventive effort decades later, even in the absence of targeted policy. I study radioactive...

We investigate the causal relationship between inventor migration and regional innovation in the context of the large-scale migration shock from East to West Germany between World War II and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Leveraging a newly constructed, century-spanning dataset on...

We investigate the causal relationship between inventor migration and regional innovation in the context of the large-scale migration shock from East to West Germany between World War II and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Leveraging a newly constructed, century-spanning dataset on...