Nowcasting Entrepreneurship: Urban Third Place versus the Creative Class

Li Fang and Timothy Slaper
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Li Fang: Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32308, USA
Timothy Slaper: Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-18

Abstract: Researchers have long debated whether entrepreneurship policy should focus on place or people. In this paper, we extend the place-based versus people-based theories using contemporaneous and geographically granular web-user online activity data to predict a region’s proclivity for entrepreneurship. We compare two theoretical hypotheses: the urban third places—informal gathering locations—that facilitate social interaction and entrepreneurship, in contrast to the creative class which fosters entrepreneurial energy and opportunity in a region. Specifically, we assess whether business formation has a stronger statistical relationship with the browsing behavior of individuals visiting websites associated with third place locations—e.g., restaurants or bars—or the concentration of web browsing behavior associated with “the creative class”. Using U.S. county-level data, we find that both urban third places and the creative class can predict about 70% of the variations in regional business formation, with the creative class having a slight competitive edge.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; website browsing behavior; nowcasting; urban third place; creative class (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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