Market Size and Entrepreneurship

In order to examine the impacts of market size on entrepreneurship, we estimate a monopolistic competition model that involves entrepreneurial decision by using data on Japanese prefectures. Our results show that a larger market size measured by the population density leads to higher incentive of people to become entrepreneurs. a 10 percent increase in the population density increases the share of people who wish to become entrepreneurs by 2 percent. In contrast, the self-employment ratio is lower in prefectures with higher population density, which suggests that the market size has different impacts on the entrepreneurship in different stages.