Entrepreneurship Culture, Knowledge Spillovers, and the Growth of Regions

An extensive literature has emerged in regional studies linking organization-based measures of entrepreneurship (e.g., self-employment, new start-ups) to regional economic performance. A limitation of the extant literature is that the measurement of entrepreneurship is not able to incorporate broader conceptual views, such as behaviour, of what actually constitutes entrepreneurship. This paper fills this gap by linking the underlying and also more fundamental and encompassing entrepreneurship culture of regions to regional economic performance. The empirical evidence suggests that those regions exhibiting higher levels of entrepreneurship culture tend to have higher employment growth. Robustness checks using causal methods confirm this finding.