20° Uddevalla Symposium: the Best Paper Award assigned to Roberto Antonietti and Francesca Gambarotto

Dal 20.06.2017 al 30.06.2017

Roberto Antonietti and Francesca Gambarotto (Department of Economics and Management, University of Padova), were given the Best Paper Award at the 20° Uddevalla Symposium on: "Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Industrial Dynamics in Internationalized Regional Economies" organized by the University West (Sweden) on june 2017. 

The awarded paper is on "Assessing the role of industry variety for the creation of innovative start-ups: evidence from Italian local labour market areas".

Abstract

This paper aims at identifying which local factors affect the creation of innovative start-ups in Italian Local Labor Market Areas. Among these factors, the focus is on industry variety and its related and unrelated components. The empirical analysis is based on data on the creation of Italian innovative start-ups between 2012 and 2015 and on the estimation of zero-inflated and hurdle negative binomial models. The estimates show that the innovative start-ups are more frequently created in areas where unrelated variety is higher, whereas no statistically significant effect is found for related variety. In these contexts, innovative start-ups can find higher opportunities to recombine different pieces of knowledge and minimize potential losses from unexpected demand shocks. Other relevant local attributes are the size of the area, human capital, presence of university, labour mobility and cultural diversity. Specialized industrial districts, instead, are related to lower amounts of innovative start-ups. Results are also robust to endogeneity.