A multi-institutional team led by Gerald Marschke from the State University of New York at Albany will link Census Bureau data on businesses and workers with the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) data collected by NSF.  The project will produce a new dataset tracking the employment of PhD holders and use it to analyze their impact on regional economies. The research team will integrate 20 years of SED data with longitudinal Census data to document where PhD recipients work, how they contribute to firm growth and innovation, and whether their presence influences wages and economic activity. To estimate causal effects, the study will use event studies and shift-share instrumental variable techniques, leveraging funding shocks to PhD programs as a source of variation. The resulting data will be made available to researchers through the Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) network, and findings will be shared through academic publications and conference presentations.