Many countries provide financial incentives to spur innovation, ranging from tax incentives to research and development grants. In this paper, we study how such financial incentives affect individuals' decisions to pursue careers in innovation. We first present empirical evidence on inventors' career trajectories and income distributions using de-identified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records in the U.S.

• Millennials benefited from the expansion of health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The share of adults in their 20s without health insurance fell by more than half from 2009 to 2017. 

• This expansion led to a reduction in racial and ethnic inequalities in health insurance coverage. 

• Young millennials have lower rates of homeownership than Generation X, baby boomers, and the Silent Generation at comparable ages. We have to reach back to a generation born nearly a century ago—the Greatest Generation—to find homeownership rates lower than those found today among millennials. 

• The racial gap in young-adult homeownership is larger for millennials than for any generation in the past century. Although the housing reforms after the civil rights era reduced the racial homeownership gap, all those gains have now been lost.

• The gender segregation of occupations is less pronounced among millennials than among any other generation in recent U.S. history. 

• By contrast, millennials are experiencing just as much racial and ethnic occupational segregation as prior generations, even though millennials are less tolerant of overt expressions of racism. 

• For men, the conventional “gloomy millennial stories” have some merit, as the median income of millennials is lower than that of Gen X, and the median earnings of millennials are not any higher than those of Gen X.

• For women, the American Dream lives on in the sense that there’s a steady generational improvement in median earnings and income, an improvement that is carrying on into the millennial generation.