Dr Ruveyda Gozen

(she/her)

Research Papers

“Historical Differences in Female-Owned Manufacturing Establishments:  The United States, 1850--1880” co-authored with Richard Hornbeck, Martin Rotemberg, Anders Humlum

(Forthcoming, AEA Papers & Proceedings) (NBER Working Paper) (Podcast Coverage: Marketplace NPR) (Chicago Booth Review)

We characterize female-owned manufacturing establishments using newly digitized manucripts from the US Census of Manufacturers (1850, 1860, 1870, 1880). Female-owned establishments were smaller than male-owned establishments and had lower capital-to-output ratios, which could reflect more constrained financial access and other distortions. Female-owned establishments employed more women and paid women higher wages, creating a potential cycle between increased female business ownership and increased female labor market participation. Female-owned establishments concentrated in sub-indutries like women's clothing and millinery, which is associated with some but not all of these differences. We also show how women owners differed from other women in the Population Census. 

“Property Rights and Innovation Dynamism:  The Role of Women Inventors ” by Ruveyda Gozen (The most recent version HERE) (CEP LSE Working Paper) (Submitted)

How do stronger property rights for disadvantaged groups affect innovation? I investigate the impact of strengthened property rights for women on U.S. innovation by analyzing the Married Women’s Property Acts, which granted equal property rights to women starting in 1845 in New York State. I examine the universe of granted patents from 1790 until 1901, exploiting the staggered adoption of the laws over time across states. The strengthening of women’s property rights led to a 40% increase in patenting activity among women in the long run, with effects peaking about a decade after the laws were introduced. Importantly, women's innovations were not of lower quality (as measured by a novelty index based on patent text analysis), and did not generate negative effects on male innovation. Finally, I show that the main mechanism was through higher human capital accumulation among women inventors and innovation incentives, rather than an increase in participation in STEM fields, labor force participation, or relieving financial frictions. 

 “Quantifying Patenting by Women in the U.S., 1845-1924” co-authored with Mike Andrews and Enrico Berkes (Draft Available Upon Request)(Submitted) 

Patents do not report inventors' gender, requiring researchers to infer the gender of inventors. To conduct these inferences, researchers must make several choices. We show how these researcher choices can affect conclusions about the role of women inventors in the U.S. from 1845 to 1924. More specifically, we compare two automated methods to determine inventor gender for the universe of U.S. patents:  inferring gender from inventors' first names and linking inventors to census data. These methods paint similar pictures about aggregate patterns of patenting by women, but often give different predictions about the gender of particular inventors. Both automated methods identify a larger number of patents by women inventors than have previously been identified in the literature. Using the gender inferred by these two methods, we study how the characteristics of patents and inventors differ by gender.

“Mapping International Technological Trajectories: Evidence from Multiple Patent Offices over Four Centuries” co-authored with John Van Reenen, Antonin Bergeaud (Draft Available Upon Request)

 This paper introduces a methodology to measure a country's trends in innovation capability ("technological trajectories'') by using patent grants across multiple patent offices. A nation with rising relative patents across multiple foreign offices is a useful indicator of improving technological prowess. We apply our new statistical approach to four centuries of patent data, focusing on the last 120 years and four major offices (US, UK, France and Germany). We document several stylized facts. First, the globaization of patenting occurred only after WW2. Second, the technological overtaking of Europe by the US occured around the time of the "Second Industrial Revolution'' in the late 19th century, predating the later overtaking in TFP. Third, we show the post-war re-birth of Germany as a major technological power in the 1950s and Japan in the 1970s. Fourth, we quantify the rise of Chinese innovation in the 2010s and show how a substantial fraction of this was related to their strength in manufacturing. Finally, we quantify technological trajectories for all the major patenting countries over the last 50 years and relate these to policies, institutions and a key explanatory factor: human capital.

“Brexit and the Falling Innovation Dynamism” co-authored with Ralf Martin and Esther Boler (Draft Available Upon Request)

We study the effects of Brexit on innovation and international innovation collaborations in the UK. Our key finding is that overall innovation in the UK has declined, and patent collaborations with the European Union fell significantly with Brexit. On the contrary, trends in collaborations between the UK and other countries, as well as between the EU and other countries, remained stable. We find similar effects for research projects funded by the EU. Overall, our findings suggest a strong correlation between Brexit and the decline in collaborations on innovations and projects within the UK and between the UK and the EU. We suggest that this is a lower-bound estimate of the impact of Brexit on innovation in the UK. Although much focus in the literature has been on immediate effects of Brexit on trade and investment, we suggest that barriers to innovation could have more serious negative implications for UK economic outcomes in the long run.

This chapter examines the role that China plays in the global economy for the propagation of financial uncertainty and volatility. For this purpose, it seeks to measure the interdependence of real and financial markets for a key set of developed markets — the US, the UK, Germany, and Japan — in relation to China. We employ vector auto-regressions (VARs) and make use of generalized impulse responses and variance decompositions to explore the interconnections among these countries. Among other results, we find that the US, Japan, UK, and Germany are highly integrated and form a cluster in terms of financial market volatility and industrial production growth. Surprisingly, we find that financial market volatility in developed countries is strongly affected by volatility shocks emanating from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, attesting to the growing importance of Asian financial markets and real activity in the global economy. By contrast, China has a different story. Chinese financial and production markets are decoupled, and Chinese industrial production growth is mainly determined by its own shocks to domestic conditions.