Age, Death, and the Nucleus of Invention

This paper identifies the age at which inventors generate the greatest spillovers for their collaborators. Linking age and death information from over 78,000 inventors that died prematurely to their 180,000 collaborators, I show that junior inventors produce more spillovers for patent production than do older inventors. Inventors who lose a junior collaborator to a premature death produce one fewer patent over the following 10 years relative to inventors who lose mid-career collaborators. This effect is strongest when the surviving is also young, and appears to be driven by junior inventors’ closer proximity to the knowledge frontier.