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  5. The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors: Comment

American Economic Review

ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)

The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors: Comment

  • Michael Wiebe
American Economic Review (Forthcoming)

Abstract

Moretti (2021) reports a positive elasticity between technology cluster size and patenting, and uses an event study and instrumental variables regressions to justify a causal interpretation. The event study does not use the variation generated by inventors moving across cities, and the instrument is constructed incorrectly due to a coding error. I run a corrected event study and fix the coding error, and find null effects. The reported elasticity may not be causal.

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