Productivity Profiles of Korean Inventors: A First Look at the Korean Inventor Panel Data

Albeit numerous endeavors in matching names and surveying inventors, inventor-level studies of patent data have been scarce because unique inventors can not be identified across patents. Using the Korean patent data with inventor IDs, birth year, and gender available, we construct unique inventor-level panel data. As the first undertaking with our data, we investigate the age profile of patent productivity among inventors. We find an inverted U-shaped profile with the peak at age 31. We also find an increasing productivity for younger cohorts of inventors. These findings are robust after we control for the calendar year effects and the quality of patents.