We investigate the geographic concentration of patenting in large cities using a sample of 14 developed countries. There is wide dispersion of the share of patented inventions in large metropolitan areas. South Korea and the US are two extreme outliers where patenting is highly concentrated in...

Popular theories claim that innovation activities should be located in large cities because of more favorable environmental conditions that are absent in smaller cities or remote and rural areas. Germany provides a clear counterexample to such theories. We argue that a main force behind the...

This paper documents the generation and the content of the Comprehensive Patent Database (CPDB) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-1990), Version 1.1, which is freely available at GESIS https://doi.org/10.7802/2423. The database contains all patents granted in the GDR and published by...

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...

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...