Changes

We started by including all U.S. cities that received at least $10m of growth venture capital in a year between 1980 and 2017 (inclusive). This gave us a list of 200 cities. However, we still have a lot of city-years with low number of startups.  What is a reasonable number of startups to analyze agglomeration? Three locations (which is at least three startups) is the bare minimum required for one hull without excluding outliers. And we only made images for places with 4 or more startups. A visual inspection suggests that while there is greater (relative) dispersion when counts are low, it isn't hugely problematic. It is also worth noting that excluding 4 or less would get rid of Farmer's Branch, Fort Lauderdale, and Tempe (and Bloomington, MN) in 2017, and 6 or less in 2017 would eliminate Cary and Addison, all of which are slightly problematic. Burlington, VT has 7 years in the data with more than 6 startups, and one with 6. But everywhere (i.e., all 200 places) have 10 or more layers at some point in time. And everywhere has at least 6 years with 6 or more observations. Detroit has just 7 obs that meet this criteria, half the number of Germantown, MD and a third of Greenwood Village, CO.! Requiring a year to have six observations would reduce us to 4916 observations from 6702 (i.e., down to 73% of the data). Requiring 9 would reduce the data down to 3889 obs (58%), and we'd lose more observations as places wouldn't have enough to form a time-series. The answer then appears to be to limit to observations with 6 or more layers. We'll code the number of layers, and the max and min number of layers for a place, into the data.