Policy Experimentation to Address Inequality Among Innovators
Inequality among innovators is a substantial social problem in terms of both equity and economic growth. For instance, Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Insights group has documented that if women, racial minorities, and low-income Americans invented at the same rate as high-income white men, then the rate of U.S. patenting would quadruple. They also note the glacial progress toward closing these gaps, such as the 118 years it will take to reach gender parity at the current rate.
These inequalities affect not only the rate of innovation, but also what kind of innovations are created—for example, all-female inventor teams are more likely to focus on women’s health. Unfortunately, the evidence base for policy interventions to reduce these innovation gaps remains depressingly shallow. Most policies are tested without a rigorous evaluation strategy or control group, making it difficult to determine whether they had any effect.
A new paper from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO, is a remarkable addition to this literature. For the first time ever, the USPTO has tested a policy intervention as a randomized experiment, allowing a credible evaluation of its effectiveness. Changes in patent policy have rarely been tested with any element of randomization and have never been tested previously by the USPTO itself. Even if this experiment had yielded null results, the effort would still have been laudable as a model for how agencies can assess the impact of a new policy and publicly disclose the results. But the experiment also documents that the intervention—a new program to help patent applicants without legal representation—led to a sizeable decrease in the gender patenting gap. Continue reading "Policy Experimentation to Address Inequality Among Innovators"
