Urban Start-up Agglomeration and Venture Capital Investment

Academic Paper
Title	Urban Start-up Agglomeration
Author	Ed Egan
RAs	Peter Jalbert, Jake Silberman, Christy Warden
Status	In development
© edegan.com, 2016

Summary

Agglomeration is generally thought to be one of the most important determinants of growth for urban entrepreneurship ecosystems. However, there is essentially no empirical evidence to support this. This paper takes advantage of geocoding and introduces a novel measure of agglomeration. This measure is the smallest circle area that covers all startup offices, subject to having at least N startups in each circle. Using GIS data on cities, this paper controls for the density and socio-demographics of an area to identify the effect of just agglomeration.

Data

• SDC VentureXpert
• GIS City Data

Also:

• Enclosing Circle Algorithm
• Normalizer
• Geocode.py

Unbiased measure

The number of startups affects the total area of the circles according to some function. The task is to find an unbiased measure of the area, which is not affected by the number of the startups, given the size and their distribution.

For the unbiased calculation of a measure in a different context see: http://users.nber.org/~edegan/w/images/d/d0/Hall_(2005)_-_A_Note_On_The_Bias_In_Herfindahl_Type_Measures_Based_On_Count_Data.pdf

GIS Resources

• https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html
• https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html
• http://postgis.net/features/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIS_file_formats