Regional Opportunities and Policy Initiatives for New Venture Creation

This paper investigates the determinants of new venture creation across industries and locations for 103 Italian provinces between 1997 and 2003. We allow for differences in regional opportunities across industries and investigate the impact of a range of factors on entrepreneurship in different industries: manufacturing, retailing and wholesaling, hotels and restaurants. Our results show that wage costs deter entry in manufacturing and that regions with industrial districts are characterized by higher start-up rates. Firm entry in commercial sectors appears higher in large cities and areas with strong economic progress. For hotels and restaurants we find that tourism positively influences new firm formation. In terms of policy we do not find a significant effect of recently introduced regional laws promoting new firm formation