Balanced Skills and the City: An Analysis of the Relationship between Entrepreneurial Skill Balance, Thickness, and Innovation
Elisabeth Sattler-Bublitz,
Michael Fritsch () and
Michael Wyrwich
Economic Geography, 2015, vol. 91, issue 4, 475-508
Abstract:
Entrepreneurs are assumed to be multiskilled, covering a number of skills and achieving in each skill a level as high as possible. Being such a jack-of-all-trades increases the probability of running an entrepreneurial venture successfully, but what happens to the jack-of-few-trades who lacks sufficient skills? This article investigates a possible compensation mechanism between balanced skills and cities and how this compensatory measure relates to performance. Specifically, we test and find support for the idea put forward by Helsley and Strange that high market thickness, such as that found in cities, can compensate for a lack of entrepreneurial skill balance. The results indicate that entrepreneurs with low skill balance benefit more from being located in cities than their counterparts with high skill balance. Innovative firms do not differ from other businesses in this respect.
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ecge.12097 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Journal Article: Balanced Skills and the City: An Analysis of the Relationship between Entrepreneurial Skill Balance, Thickness, and Innovation (2015) 
Working Paper: Balanced Skills and the City: An Analysis of the Relationship between Entrepreneurial Skill Balance, Thickness and Innovation (2013) 
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:bla:ecgeog:v:91:y:2015:i:4:p:475-508
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0095
Access Statistics for this article
Economic Geography is currently edited by Yuko Aoyama, Amy Glasmeier, Gernot Grabher and Henry Wai-chung Yeung
More articles in Economic Geography from Clark University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().