Patents and the Independent Inventor Lifecycle

We present results from the first ever randomized control trial on independent inventors at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This experiment, called the Pro Se Pilot, led to an 8 percentage point increase in the likelihood of receiving a patent. We exploit the random assignment of treatment to identify causal impacts of receiving a patent on short term independent inventor outcomes. Our results suggest that patenting is key to inventive, innovative, and entrepreneurial activity. We find large effect sizes of patenting on reducing financial frictions, participating in markets for technology (18.7 pp), and signaling inventor value to established firms (24.8 pp).