Disambiguation of Researcher Careers: Shifting the Perspective from Documents to Authors

The thesis describes an algorithm that disambiguates the namespaces of inventors and researchers, spawned by their patents and publications, into career paths. A probabilistic theory to assess the risk of erroneously linking documents of namesakes, different individuals with a mutual name, into one career bypasses the need for training datasets, thereby avoiding a namesake bias caused by the inherent underestimation of namesakes in training/benchmark data. The economic relevance of identified careers is illustrated by two applications. The first one outlines the impact of inter-regional inventor mobility in Italy on the total factor productivity of the sending and receiving regions. We show that an inflow of high skilled labor has a significant positive effect on TFP, while outflow decreases it. We further separate mobility in firm-internal relocation and job switches to find a more pronounced effect for the latter mobility. The second application observes the reaction of German university researchers to an exogenous change in federal law pertaining the property rights of their inventions equivalent to the Bayh Dole Act. Being able to trace their careers along with the careers of an unaffected control group allows us to evaluate the efficacy of technology transfer offices replacing the former informal activities of the university professors in regard of academic entrepreneurship. We find that an overall decrease of university patenting neutralizes any institutionalized efforts of spurring entrepreneurship at the expense of informal faculty-firm networks as channels for knowledge transfer.