Cultural diversity, cities and innovation: firm effects or city effects?

Neil Lee

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Growing cultural diversity is seen as important for innovation. Research has focused on two potential mechanisms: a firm effect, with diversity at the firm level improving knowledge sourcing or ideas generation, and a city effect, where diverse cities helping firms innovate. This paper uses a dataset of over 2,000 UK SMEs to test between these two. Controlling for firm characteristics, city characteristics and firm and city diversity, there is strong evidence for the firm effect. Firms with a greater share of migrant owners or partners are more likely to introduce new products and processes. This effect has diminishing returns, suggesting that it is a ‘diversity’ effect rather than simply the benefits of migrant run firms. However, there is no relationship between the share of foreign workers in a local labour market and firm level innovation, nor do migrant-run firms in diverse cities appear particularly innovative. But urban context does matter and firms in London with more migrant owners and partners are more innovative than others.

Keywords: cultural diversity; innovation; cities; SMEs; migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 L21 M13 O11 O31 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-cul, nep-ent, nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-sbm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/57874/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Cultural Diversity, Cities and Innovation: firm Effects or City Effects? (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:57874

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