Yes — modestly: states with more patenting per capita saw somewhat faster wage growth, 2014-2024 (r=0.42), but the relationship is not strong and is driven partly by a few standout states.

Summary

Yes, on average — but the relationship is modest, not deterministic. Across the 50 states + DC, states with more patenting per capita (measured by where the INVENTOR lives, 2015-2024) saw somewhat faster nominal wage growth from 2014 to 2024. The correlation is r = 0.42 (R² = 0.18): each additional inventor-patent per 100,000 residents per year is associated with about +0.04 percentage points of extra wage growth over the decade (p = 0.002). This holds up under leave-one-state-out testing (no sign flip, no state pushes p above 0.05), though Washington State is unusually influential — it is both the most wage-growth state (+72.7%) and a high-patent state, and removing it roughly halves the slope (to 0.026, still p<0.05). A cruder split — comparing the top half of states by patent intensity against the bottom half — is NOT statistically significant (p = 0.24), which tells you the relationship is real but noisy: it shows up as a broad tilt across the full range of the data, not as a clean two-group gap. Several very low-patent states (Arkansas, Hawaii, South Dakota) posted above-average wage growth, and several mid-to-high patent states (Connecticut, New Jersey, Michigan) posted below-average growth, so patent intensity is far from the whole story.

How "inventing" and "wage growth" were defined

Inventing intensity: USPTO PatentsView data (via AskAmerica's patents schema) attributes each granted patent to the state where its INVENTOR(S) reside — not the state of the corporate assignee/HQ. This distinction matters: an assignee-based count would inflate Delaware (many firms register IP-holding subsidiaries there) relative to where the actual R&D work happens. Massachusetts and California are the standout inventor-residence states once expressed per capita; using an assignee-based count instead is known to produce a different ranking (Delaware jumps to the top on assignee-based counts per outside reporting — see Sources). Metric: total inventor-patent-grant instances 2015-2024 (utility+plant patents, PatentsView g_inventor_disambiguated), divided by the state's 2019 Census PEP population and by 10 years, giving inventor-patents per 100,000 residents per year.

Wage growth: BLS QCEW (Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages) average weekly wage, all industries, all ownership sectors, comparing 2014 to 2024 (the most recent full year loaded). Reported as nominal percent change. Because every state faces the SAME national inflation rate over the same window, a nominal-growth-rate comparison across states preserves the same ranking a real (inflation-adjusted) comparison would show — unlike a level comparison, a growth-rate ranking does not require a separate cost-of-living correction to compare across places (BEA regional price parities matter for comparing wage LEVELS across states, not the amount each state's own wage level moved over time).

Method and robustness checks

• OLS regression (wage_growth_pct ~ patents_per_100k, n=51): slope = 0.0400, SE = 0.0122, t = 3.28, p = 0.0019, R² = 0.180.
• Leave-one-state-out sensitivity analysis: coefficient ranges from 0.026 (Washington omitted) to 0.046 (Massachusetts omitted) across all 51 refits. No sign flip; no refit crosses p = 0.05. Washington is flagged as the most influential single state (|influence| = 1.14, the only state exceeding the 1.0 threshold), meaning the relationship's exact strength is somewhat sensitive to one state, though its direction and significance are not.
• Top-half vs. bottom-half t-test (median split on patent intensity): top half mean wage growth 47.1%, bottom half 44.5%, Welch's t = 1.18, p = 0.24 — not significant. This is expected and not a contradiction: a median split throws away the continuous information the regression uses, and is much more sensitive to where the few highest/lowest states happen to fall.
• Extremes contrast: the 10 most patent-intensive states (MA, CA, WA, MN, OR, CT, NH, VT, MI, NJ) averaged 49.2% wage growth vs. 40.4% for the 10 least patent-intensive (WY, OK, SD, AR, AL, HI, LA, WV, MS, AK) — directionally consistent with the regression but not separately significance-tested here.

Confound not controlled for: this is a bivariate relationship. States with high inventor-patent density (MA, CA, WA, CT, NJ) are disproportionately high-cost, high-education, tech/pharma-heavy economies where wages were already elevated and industry mix (tech, especially) saw outsized nominal wage growth nationally over 2014-2024 for reasons unrelated to in-state patenting per se. The 0.04-point slope should be read as an association net of nothing else — not a causal estimate of what patenting itself buys a state in wage growth.

Context from outside research

Independent reporting corroborates both the inventor-vs-assignee distinction and the broad pattern that patenting activity clusters where wages and opportunity are already elevated: California and Massachusetts alternate at the top of inventor-residence patent-per-capita rankings (Massachusetts ~167/100k by inventor residence vs. California's ~127/100k by total/assignee-adjacent counts, per Technical.ly's 2023 analysis), while Mississippi trails at roughly 4-13 patents per 100k. A 2024 St. Louis Fed analysis found patents and aggregate productivity growth correlated at roughly 0.76 at the national level over long time spans — a much stronger national-time-series relationship than the modest cross-state relationship found here, which is consistent with patenting mattering more for AGGREGATE productivity growth over time than for explaining WHICH states' wages grew fastest in a single decade.