Research project

Women Inventors

We are researching gender bias in terms of patents, using a unique dataset that brings together Italian administrative records of INPS employers-employees with patent data from the European Patent Office (1987-2008), which provides information on gender, place of birth, place of work, salary, employment status, etc.

8.8% of the inventors in our dataset are women (1380 sur 15732). We intend to empirically verify if ideas about the role of women in society are historically pervasive by testing to see if there are any differences in the likelihood or not of a woman to receive a patent depending on her birthplace (whether she was born into the state of the Pope, the "Regno delle due Sicilie", a "Commune" or a "Signoria”) in the 14th century.

The underlying hypothesis is that the rules and regulations governing local political regimes in the Middle Ages have ongoing individual economic effects today (see Guiso et al (2016); de Blasio and Nuzzo (2009) and d’Adda and de Blasio (2017)). We can also test for gender differences in the allotment of patents and investigate whether or not this difference can be explained by cultural and geographical differences.

RESULTS OF THE STUDY

Researchers

Agata Maida

Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Milan in Italy and principal researcher at LABORatorio Riccardo Revelli-CCA.

see CV

Dr. Jörg Franke

Agate Maida is professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Milan in Italy and principal researcher at LABORatorio Riccardo Revelli-CCA. She has an established research record in labor economics. Her articles have been published in The Review of Economic Studies, The Economic Journal, Economics Letters, and Industrial and Labor Relation Review.

MOST RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Female Leadership and Gender Gap within Firms: Evidence from an Italian Board Reform , con Andrea Weber (2020), Industrial and Labor Relation Review, forthcoming DOI: 10.1177/0019793920961995

Does Employment Protection Affect Educational Mismatch? con Cristina Tealdi (2020) British Journal of Industrial Relations,  
 

Sabrina Di Addario

Economist at the Bank of Italy

see CV

Sabrina Di Addario is an economist at the Bank of Italy (Department of Historical Economics). She works at the intersection of labor economics, innovation economics, and urban economics, and has published in the Journal of Urban Economics, Labour Economics, and the Journal of Regional Science.

MOST RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Job Search in Thick Markets,” Journal of Urban Economics, 69, (3), (2011), pp. 303-318

Entrepreneurship and Market Size. The Case of Young College Graduates in Italy,” with Daniela Vuri, Labour Economics, 17, (5), (2010), pp. 848-858
 

Michela Giorcelli

Professor of Economics at University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA) and university researcher at NBER.

see CV

Michela Giorelli is professor of Economics at University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA) and university researcher at NBER. Her interests lie at the intersection of economics, innovation, and economic history. She has been published in American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of European Economic Association.

MOST RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Giorcelli, Michela, and Petra Moser. 2020. “Copyright and Creativity: Evidence from the Italian Opera during the Napoleonic Age,” Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming

Giorcelli, Michela. 2019. “The Long-Term Effects of Management and Technology Transfers,” American Economic Review, 109(1): 121-55

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