Stefano Magrini (p), Margherita Gerolimetto, Alessandro Spiganti

Michael Stuetzer

In the last decades, the geography of innovation activity became much more concentrated. By focusing on the US metropolitan statistical area of residence of the inventors of patents filed to the United States Patents and Trademark Office between 1990 and 2016, we show that this is increasingly true also for “green” innovation, i.e. patents covering mitigation or adaptation to climate change. We find a sharp increase in concentration across areas after the beginning of the 2000s, with areas that are generally more innovative also producing more green patents. Focusing on the relationship between green innovation and urban density, we find evidence of a positive significant relationship only after 2002. To shed some light on this puzzling outcome, we further qualified the concept of density to urban human capital density, finding the expected significant relationship between green innovation and density before and after 2002, and we aim at possibly rationalizing these findings.

Michael Stuetzer (p), Abel Brodeur, Martin Obschonka, David Audretsch, Jason Rentfrow, Jeff Potter, Sam Gosling

Stefano Magrini

Entrepreneurial culture is a critical focus of research and policy. While the extant literature often treats it as exogenous, we propose a theory of endogenous entrepreneurial culture to explain the evolution of regional entrepreneurship and its underlying culture. We apply this model to the U.S. gold rush in the 19th century as a natural experiment. Using causal methods, we find empirical evidence for persistent high entrepreneurship rates in the gold rush counties over time. Regarding the mechanisms underlying this persistence, we find empirical evidence for selective migration of entrepreneurially minded people to the gold rush counties over a period of 100 years. The entrepreneurial culture in the gold rush counties additionally induced migrants to the gold rush to become more entrepreneurial. Lastly, we also find some evidence that of pro-entrepreneurship institutions in the states influenced by the gold rush positively affected entrepreneurship.