Entrepreneurship and Market Size: The Case of Young College Graduates in Italy
24 Pages Posted: 8 Nov 2010
There are 6 versions of this paper
Entrepreneurship and Market Size - The Case of Young College Graduates in Italy
Entrepreneurship and Market Size: The Case of Young College Graduates in Italy
Entrepreneurship and Market Size: The Case of Young College Graduates in Italy
Entrepreneurship and Market Size: The Case of Young College Graduates in Italy
Entrepreneurship and Market Size: The Case of Young College Graduates in Italy
Entrepreneurship and Market Size: The Case of Young College Graduates in Italy
Date Written: November 8, 2010
Abstract
We analyse empirically the effects of urbanization on Italian college graduates’ work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that doubling the province of work’s population density reduces the chances of being an entrepreneur by 2-3 percentage points. This result holds after controlling for regional fixed effects and is robust to instrumenting urbanization. Provinces’ competition, urban amenities and dis-amenities, cost of labour, earning differentials between employees and self-employed workers, unemployment rates and value added per capita account for more than half of the negative urbanization penalty. Our result cannot be explained by the presence of negative differentials in returns to entrepreneurship between the most and the least densely populated areas either. In fact, as long as they succeed in entering the most densely populated markets, young entrepreneurs are able to reap-off the benefits of urbanization externalities: the elasticity of entrepreneurs’ net monthly earnings with respect to population density is 0:02-0:03.
Keywords: Labour Market Transitions, Urbanization
JEL Classification: R12, J24, J21
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation