Booming Bohemia? Evidence from the US High-Technology Industry

David Bieri

Industry and Innovation, 2010, vol. 17, issue 1, 23-48

Abstract: This paper assesses the effect of Richard Florida's creative class on economic growth and development at two levels of spatial aggregation. First, I examine the dynamics of economic growth across US metropolitan regions and investigate how they relate to regional specialization and the concentration of talent in the high-tech industry. In addition to evidence of significant high-tech clusters, I identify important complementarities with regard to the interaction between the three Ts of regional development (talent, technology and tolerance) and regional growth dynamics. Using firm-level data, the regional analysis is then complemented by exploring the location of new high-technology plant openings and their relationship with university research and development (R&D) and the creative class. Specifically, I test the hypothesis that both university R&D and the presence of “creativity” generate spillovers which are captured locally in the form of new high-tech establishments, after controlling for important location factors such as local cost, demand and agglomeration economies. While the marginal impacts of increased R&D funding on county probability for new firm formation is modest, the mix of creativity and diversity—as proxied by the Florida measure—appears to be a key driver in the locational choice of new high-tech firms. Separate estimates indicate that these findings hold up across the major high-tech industries in the USA.

Keywords: Regional growth; firm location; creative class; high-tech industry; R&D (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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DOI: 10.1080/13662710903573828

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