Regional knowledge production and entrepreneurial firm creation: Spatial Dynamic Analyses

This study assesses whether and to what extent new knowledge available in a region and its surrounding regions induces and facilitates new firm creation, an important topic that is largely left untested in the literature. Using a full population firm-level dataset of 44,434 newly created entrepreneurial firms in the manufacturing sector in 234 regions of South Korea between 2000 and 2004, its econometric estimations indicate a positive externality effect of new knowledge production on activities of new firm creation within and across the regional boundaries, with the intra-regional effect being stronger than the inter-regional one. The estimations also show that both the intra- and inter-regional effects are stronger in high-tech industries than in low-tech industries.