Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/314688 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 11649
Publisher: 
CESifo GmbH, Munich
Abstract: 
The share of female inventors remains significantly lower than that of men in both developed and developing countries. This paper studies gender bias in patenting activity, using a unique dataset that matches Italian administrative employer-employee records both to patent data from the European Patent Office (1987-2005) and to municipality-level information on medieval guilds from the Italian Central Archive of State. We empirically verify whether women's low propensity to patent can be explained by the historical local conception of women's role in society, which we measure with the share of women in guild founders from the Middle Ages. The results indicate that the presence of women in Medieval guilds is associated with a higher probability of observing a female inventor and a higher number of yearly patent submissions by women.
Subjects: 
patents
women
inventors
guilds
JEL: 
J60
Document Type: 
Working Paper
Appears in Collections:

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.