New Firm Formation and the properties of local knowledge bases: Evidence from Italian NUTS 3 regions

Alessandra Colombelli and Francesco Quatraro

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between the creation of new firms and the properties of the local knowledge bases, like coherence, cognitive distance and variety. By combining the literature on the knowledge spillovers of entrepreneurship and that on the recombinant knowledge approach, we posit that locally available knowledge matters to the entrepreneurial process, but the type of knowledge underlying theses dynamics deserve to be analyzed. The analysis is carried out on 104 Italian NUTS 3 regions observed over the time span 1995-2011. The results show that the complementarity degree of local knowledge is important, while increasing similarity yields negative effects. This suggests that the creation of new firms in Italy is associated to the exploitation of well established technological trajectories grounded on competences accumulated over time, although cognitive proximity is likely to engender lock-in effects and hinder such process.

Keywords: New Firm Formation; Knowledge-Spillovers Theory of Entrepreneurship; Recombinant Knowledge; Knowledge Coherence; Variety; Cognitive Distance; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-07-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-sbm and nep-ure
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00858989
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00858989/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-00858989

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD (hal@ccsd.cnrs.fr).