Tag Archives: economic geography

The shape and structure of entrepreneurial and innovative places

Geoffrey Borchhardt and Olav Sorenson

Interactions primarily occur between those living and working in close proximity to one another. This essay explores some consequences of that fact for places. It offers three principle propositions: (1) Compact buildings, neighborhoods, and cities, and denser places, should promote higher rates of entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth because they reduce the costs of interaction. (2) More integrated places should also promote entrepreneurship and innovation because the average person in those places interacts with a more diverse set of others. (3) In more segregated and unevenly distributed places, people diverge more, as a function of where within the place they live and work, in their propensities to innovate and to found firms.

The Silicon Valley Syndrome

Doris Kwon and Olav Sorenson

How does expansion in the high-tech sector influence the broader economy of a region? We demonstrate that an infusion of venture capital in a region leads to: (i) declines in the number of establishments and in employment in non–high-tech industries in the tradable sector; (ii) increases in entry and in employment in the non-tradable sector; and (iii) a rise in income inequality in the non-tradable sector. Expansion in the high-tech sector therefore leads to a less diverse tradable sector and to increasing inequality in the region.

Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, 47(2): 344-368.

Summarized on the UCLA Anderson Review

Summarized on Yale Insights

Social networks and the geography of entrepreneurship

Print version of Prize Lecture for the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, 2018

Olav Sorenson

Social relationships play at least three important roles in entrepreneurship. They help to determine who sees entrepreneurship as an available and desirable career path. Entrepreneurs use their contacts to raise funds for and to recruit employees and partners to their ventures. Social relationships also influence where and when entrepreneurs want to spend their leisure time. Because of these factors, entrepreneurs tend to found their firms in the places that they live (and in the industries in which they have been employed). That, in turn, implies that industries will tend to become and remain concentrated in a small number of places, even when firms do not benefit from this clustering.

Small Business Economics, 51 (2018): 527-537 (OPEN ACCESS)

Innovation policy in a networked world

Olav Sorenson

Social relationships channel information, influence, and access to scarce resources. As a consequence, social networks—-the patterns of these relationships across the members of a community—-influence who comes up with important innovations, whether and how rapidly those innovations get adopted, and who has the ability to commercialize them. They therefore also affect the overall rate at which innovation occurs in the economy. This paper provides an introduction to and review of the research on social networks most relevant to innovation, with a particular focus on the earliest stages of the innovation process. It then discusses the likely consequences of a variety of policy interventions that could either reduce the importance of social relationships to innovation or alter the patterns of relationships in ways that might promote innovation.

Innovation Policy and the Economy, 18 (2018): 53-77

NBER Working Paper Preprint

Regional ecologies of entrepreneurship

Olav Sorenson

Why do some regions produce more entrepreneurs than others? An ecological lens provides insight into this question: The demography of organizations in a region – particularly the proportion of small and young em- ployers – shapes many aspects of the environment for would-be entrepreneurs: (i) beliefs about the desirability of founding a firm, (ii) opportunities to learn about entrepreneurship and to build the abilities needed to succeed, and (iii) the ease of acquiring critical resources. Births of new industries and the demise of mature ones can therefore catalyze rapid changes in the rates of entrepreneurship that become self-reinforcing.

Journal of Economic Geography, 17 (2017): 959-974

Community and capital in entrepreneurship and economic growth

Sampsa Samila and Olav Sorenson

We argue that social and financial capital have a complementary relationship in fostering innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth. Using panel data on metropolitan areas in the United States, from 1993 to 2002, our analyses reveal that social integration – in the microgeography of residential patterns – moderates the effect of venture capital, with more integrated regions benefitting more from expansions in the supply of financial capital. Our results remain robust to estimation with an instrumental variable to address potential endogeneity in the geography of venture capital. We also find some evidence for a similar effect from business associations. Our findings support the idea that social structure may contribute importantly to regional economic differences.

American Sociological Review, 82 (2017): 770-795

Summarized in Yale Insights

Video summary from Yale Insights

Expand innovation finance via crowdfunding

Olav Sorenson, Valentina Assenova, Guan-Cheng Li, Jason Boada, and Lee Fleming

Using data on Kickstarter campaigns and venture capital investments from 2009–2015, we explored whether crowdfunding expanded access to financial capital, in the sense of supporting innovation in more geographically diverse regions than venture capital. Over this period, crowdfunding has supported projects in many regions that have attracted little or no venture capital. Within regions, moreover, the evidence suggests that successful crowdfunding campaigns attract future venture capital investments and that they have been doing so at an increasing rate. Crowdfunding therefore appears to be expanding access to capital to a larger pool of innovators.

Science, 354 (2016): 1526-1528

Supplemental Materials

Replication data and analysis files

Geography, joint choices and the reproduction of gender inequality

Olav Sorenson and Michael S. Dahl

We examine the extent to which the gender wage gap stems from dual-earner couples jointly choosing where to live. If couples locate in places better suited for the man’s employment than for the woman’s, the resulting mismatch of women to employers will de- press women’s wages. Examining data from Denmark, our analyses indicate (i) that Danish couples chose locations with higher expected wages for the man than for the woman, (ii) that the better matching of men in couples to local employers could account for up to 36% of the gender wage gap, and (iii) that the greatest asymmetry in the apparent importance of the man’s versus the woman’s potential earnings occurred among couples with pre-school age children and where the male partner had accounted for a larger share of household income before the potential move.

American Sociological Review,81 (2016): 900-920

Podcast on the paper (interviewed by Cristobal Young)

Financing by and for the masses: An introduction to the special issue on crowdfunding

Lee Fleming and Olav Sorenson

This introduction to the special issue on crowdfunding begins by providing some information about the history and nature of the phenomenon. It then summarizes some of the key advantages and disadvantages of crowdfunding for entrepreneurs and for investors, introducing the various articles in the issue that explore these topics in greater depth. It concludes with some speculations regarding the possible future of the industry and its effects on entrepreneurship, innovation, and inequality.


California Management Review, 58 (2016): 5-19

 

The who, why and how of spinoffs

Michael S. Dahl and Olav Sorenson

Studies have consistently found that entrepreneurs who enter industries in which they have prior experience as employees perform better than others. We nevertheless know relatively little about what accounts for these differences. The presumed explanation has generally been that these entrepreneurs benefit from the knowledge that they gained in their former jobs. But they might also differ from other entrepreneurs on a variety of other dimensions: Preferential access to resources or differing motivations, for example, may account for their decisions to enter known industries instead of new ones. Combining novel data from a representative survey of entrepreneurs in Denmark with a matched employer-employee database of all residents in Denmark, we examined how entrepreneurs with prior industry experience differed from those without and the extent to which these differences could account for the performance premium associated with prior industry experience. We found that those with industry experience came from younger, smaller and more profitable firms, and that they recruited more experienced employees, worked harder and placed less value on having flexible hours. The recruitment of more experienced employees and the greater effort exerted appeared to account for at least some of the performance advantage associated with prior industry experience.

Industrial and Corporate Change, 23 (2014): 661-688