The Effects of State and Local Economic Incentives on Business Start-Ups in the United States: County-Level Evidence
Mark Partridge,
Sydney Schreiner,
Alexandra Tsvetkova and
Carlianne Patrick
Economic Development Quarterly, 2020, vol. 34, issue 2, 171-187
Abstract:
Even as economic incentives are increasingly used by policy makers to spur state and local economic development, their use is controversial among the public and academics. The authors examine whether state and local incentives lead to higher rates of business start-ups in metropolitan counties. Existing research indicates that start-ups are important for supporting (net) job creation, long-term growth, innovation, and development. The authors find that incentives have a statistically significant, negative relationship with start-up rates in total and for some industries including export-based and others that often receive incentives. The findings support critics who contend that incentives crowd out other economic activity, potentially reducing long-term growth. The authors also find that greater intersectoral job flows are positively linked to total start-ups, consistent with claims of those who advocate for policies that enhance labor market flexibility through reducing barriers to job mobility.
Keywords: business incentives; firm formation; instrumental variable estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891242420916249 (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:34:y:2020:i:2:p:171-187
DOI: 10.1177/0891242420916249
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Economic Development Quarterly
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().