Incubation Push or Business Pull? Investigating the Geography of U.S. Business Incubators

Haifeng Qian, Kingsley E. Haynes and James D. Riggle
Additional contact information
Haifeng Qian: Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH, USA
Kingsley E. Haynes: George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, khaynes@gmu.edu
James D. Riggle: George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

Economic Development Quarterly, 2011, vol. 25, issue 1, 79-90

Abstract: The primary purposes of this article are to present new data on the geographic distribution of U.S. business incubators and to explore the geographically bounded factors that influence the location of business incubators. The authors’ data show that U.S. business incubators are unevenly distributed across urban/rural divisions, states, and counties. Factor analysis identifies three common factors from 28 demographic, social, and economic variables drawn from publicly available data at the county level. These factors include agglomeration, welfare, and business/entrepreneurship. The results of binomial logistic regressions suggest that incubators are more likely to be found in counties with high levels of agglomeration but low levels of existing business development. Our findings suggest support for the incubation push hypothesis over the business pull hypothesis on the location of business incubators based on the regional configuration of incubator presence.

Keywords: business incubators; geography; push-pull effects; entrepreneurship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891242410383275 (text/html)

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:sae:ecdequ:v:25:y:2011:i:1:p:79-90

DOI: 10.1177/0891242410383275

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development Quarterly
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().