The social origins of inventors

That is a new paper by Aghion, Akcigit, Hyytinen, and Toivanen, here is one brief excerpt:

In particular we see that IQ is by far the main characteristic for the probability of becoming an inventor in terms of the share of variation it explains, followed by parental education.  These two groups of variables account for 66% and 16% of the overall variation captured by our model.  In contrast, IQ plays a relatively speaking much more minor role for becoming a medical doctor or a lawyer.  Parental education is the main explanatory variable for the probability of becoming a medical doctor or a lawyer (40% and 53%), with base controls and parental income also playing clearly more important roles than for inventors.

The paper offers many other points of value, and you will note the data are from Finland.

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