Economies of scale and scope in Finnish non-life insurance are studied. The production process is separated into cost and portfolio management functions. Firms expand their branch network to either gain market power or informational advantages. There are diseconomies of scale at firm and economies of scale at branch level, and economies of scope in production. Large firms in the non-life insurance industry pay a substantial premium to gain market power via branch networks. The retained premiums-curve of portfolio management is U-shaped and a positive function of the number of branches.

Modern growth theory puts invention on the center stage. Inventions are created by individuals, raising the question of whether we can increase the number of inventors. To answer this question, we study the causal effect of MSc engineering education on invention, using data on U.S. patents’ Finnish inventors and the distance to the nearest technical university as an instrument. We find a positive effect of engineering education on the propensity to patent and a negative OLS bias. Our counterfactual calculation suggests that establishing three new technical universities resulted in a 20% increase in the number of USPTO patents by Finnish inventors.

A key input to inventive activity is human capital. Hence, it is important to understand the monetary incentives of inventors. We estimate the effect of patented inventions on individual earnings by linking data on U.S. patents and their inventors to Finnish employer-employee data. Returns are heterogeneous: inventors get a temporary reward of 3% of annual earnings for a patent grant and for highly cited patents a longer-lasting premium of 30% in earnings three years later. Similar medium-term premium's accrue to inventors who initially hold the patent rights, although they forgo earnings at the time of the grant.

We study the expected welfare effects of targeted R&D subsidies using project-level data from Finland. We model the application and R&D investment decisions of firms and the subsidy-granting decision of the public agency in charge of the program. Our model and institutional environment allow us to identify different benefits and costs of the R&D subsidy program. We find that expected effects of subsidies are very heterogeneous and estimated application costs low on average. The social rate of return on targeted subsidies is 30% to 50%, but spillover effects of subsidies are smaller than effects on firm profits.

We look at how the arrival of an invention affects wage returns and the probability of moving out of employment for white- and blue-collar co-workers of the inventor. First results suggest that older workers are hurt by the arrival of an invention. This negative effect disappears when we control for education and, in particular, for the time since obtaining the last formal degree, that is, distance to human capital frontier. If anything, this effect is slightly higher for non-STEM than STEM-educated co-workers. This result suggests that retraining programs could be helpful in making the process of creative destruction and economic growth more inclusive.