Patenting in an Entrepreneurial Region during the Great Depression: The Case of Cleveland, Ohio

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Naomi Lamoreaux Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics and Professor of History, Yale University
• Thursday 07 February 2019, 12:30-13:30
• Castle Teaching Room, Cambridge Judge Business School.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact CERF/CF Admin.

This paper investigates the effect of a major macroeconomic shock, the Great Depression, on patenting in an innovative region. Cleveland, Ohio, was a vibrant industrial city in the 1920s, a hotbed of inventive activity and small-scale startups in a range of important Second Industrial Revolution industries. One might expect a shock of the magnitude of the Great Depression to have taken a serious toll on inventive activity, especially in a region such as Cleveland’s, where there were so many small firms dependent on external finance. We explore this issue by comparing the career patenting records of two cohorts of Cleveland patentees who obtained a threshold number of inventions during the years 1910-12 and 1928-30 and find remarkably little effect of the Depression on patenting. We then look at the patenting careers of graduates from the Case School of Applied Science. Only when we focus on the students who graduated in the midst of the Depression do we find a significant effect. We conclude that an important negative consequence of the Depression was to prevent a new generation of inventors from forming to carry on the region’s innovative tradition.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Finance Workshop Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• CERF and CF Events
• Cambridge Finance Workshop Series
• Cambridge Judge Business School
• Castle Teaching Room, Cambridge Judge Business School
• Interested Talks
• Room W2.01 , Cambridge Judge Business School
• Room W2.02 , Cambridge Judge Business School

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.