Download This PaperEntrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines
Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 2, No. 97, 2015
Harvard Business School Entrepreneurial Management Working Paper No. 13-015
24 Pages Posted: 9 Aug 2012 Last revised: 6 Oct 2015
There are 3 versions of this paper
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines
Date Written: May 2015
Abstract
We study entrepreneurship and growth through the lens of U.S. cities. Initial entrepreneurship correlates strongly with urban employment growth, but endogeneity bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near cities led to specialization in industries, like steel, with significant scale economies and that those big firms subsequently damped entrepreneurship across several generations. Proximity to historical mining deposits is associated with reduced entrepreneurship for cities in the 1970s and onward in industries unrelated to mining. We use historical mines as an instrument for our modern entrepreneurship measures and find a persistent link between entrepreneurship and city employment growth.
Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Industrial Organization, Chinitz, Agglomeration, Clusters, Cities, Mines
JEL Classification: L0, L1, L2, L6, N5, N9, O1, O4, R0, R1
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns
By Glenn Ellison, Edward L. Glaeser, ...
-
What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns
By Glenn Ellison, Edward L. Glaeser, ...
-
By Edward L. Glaeser and William Kerr