Human-Capital Shocks and Innovation: Evidence from Britain’s Lost Generation

This paper studies how World War I mortality shocks to British communities affected long-run innovation. Linking parish-level military deaths to universal patent data (1895–1979) and inventor records, we compare high- and low-mortality areas. A 10 percent increase in deaths reduces the probability that a parish produces any patent by 0.09–0.12 percentage points and the probability that a parish produces a breakthrough patent by three times as much. Mortality depresses both the entry of new inventors and the productivity of established ones, particularly in frontier and technologically complex fields. Mobility, collaboration, and stronger local innovation ecosystems mitigate these effects, albeit only partially.