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Do we have too many university graduates? What lifetime earnings profiles can tell us
Hrendash, Taras ; Jurajda, Štěpán ; Münich, Daniel ; Doleželová, P. ; Mrázek, P.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Czech Republic has experienced dynamic growth in its university-educated workforce. This trend was initially driven by the foundation and growth of private universities in the Czech Republic in the late 1990s, followed from 2005 onwards by a substantial opening-up of public universities. The share of the population aged between 30 and 34 with higher education has more than doubled over the course of three decades. From an economic perspective, do we now have too many university graduates in the Czech Republic? The answer to this question is crucial when it comes to deciding the extent to which the state should – financially or otherwise – support future growth in the numbers of university students and graduates, and how much it should encourage citizens to pursue initial or lifelong university education. The answer is also an important factor in debates about the need to increase the currently low financial support available to university students. The study we present here provides descriptive statistics about employees’ wages and salaries, which serve as a useful basis for any discussion of this important question. We compare trends in university-educated employees’ wages and salaries for cohorts born in 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990. The shares of university graduates in these cohorts differ substantially. Further, we observe trends in the earnings ratio for these cohorts between university- and secondary-educated employees, i.e., the percentage differences between the mean or median earnings of employees with higher education and those of employees with only secondary education.
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Essays in Economics of Innovations
Hrendash, Taras ; Gaule, Patrick (advisor) ; Ganguli, Ina (referee) ; de Rassenfosse, Gaetan (referee)
This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter proposes a novel multi-layer clustering algorithm aimed to identify technology clusters from the network of collaboration ties among innovators with geo-coded locations. Using this novel algorithm, I identify innovation clusters in the U.S. Patent Inventor Database by simultaneously exploring two dimensions: the spatial distribution of inventors and the patterns of interconnections among them. Based on the clusters identified, I show that a combination of proximity and interconnectedness of inventors within the cluster boundaries is related to higher quality of innovations than those produced outside the clusters. In the second chapter, I exploit the introduction of the USPTO's Prioritized Examination (Track One) Program to capture the impact of shortened pendency on the likelihood that a pending or granted patent will be commercialized via the transfer of property rights. I find that the Track One program significantly increased the probability of commercial reassignment of applications that were more likely to be prioritized. In the third chapter, joint with Christian Fons-Rosen and Patrick Gaulé, we investigate causes of the ageing of the U.S. scientific workforce. Using novel data on the population of U.S. chemistry faculty members...
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Prioritized examination and its impact on commercialization of patents
Hrendash, Taras
Patents play an important role in facilitating transfers of knowledge, and enable commercialization of innovative ideas by reducing information asymmetry between potential buyers and sellers on the market for technology. The crucial question, however, is how quickly innovative ideas can be patented. Previous research has shown that the probability of commercialization for pending\napplications peaks immediately after the patent allowance event (Gans, Hsu & Stern, 2008). But does the length of pendency of an application at a patent office also affect the overall saleability of a technology and create some frictions on the market for technology? In this paper, we exploit the introduction of the USPTO’s Prioritized Examination (Track One) Program to capture the impact of shortened pendency on the likelihood that a pending or granted patent will be commercialized via the transfer of property rights. Using the differencein-differences approach, we compare the average saleability of patents, which we assign into three groups according to their predicted propensity for prioritization before and after the program start date. We find that introduction of the Track One program has significantly increased the probability of commercial reassignment of applications that were more likely to be prioritized. Our results suggest that the policy implemented by the USPTO and shortened pendency of applications, in general, may reduce frictions on the market for technology and facilitate commercialization of innovations.
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