Entrepreneurship and economic development: the relative attraction of employment centres by firm size

Our research empirically explores the relative importance of firm size in fostering economic growth by using cross-sectional variation in the relative location of large and small firms in urban centres of employment. Our method compares the relative location of large and small firms between the older and established centres of employment with the newly emerging employment sub-centres. We conduct our cross-sectional examination of dynamic changes using data from 2010 for the Houston, Texas metropolitan area. We find that large firms are more likely than small to desire a central location not only in the CBD, but in the newly emerging sub-centres as well.