The Geography of Female Entrepreneurship
Stuart Rosenthal and William Strange (PIs). The current research in this project continues our efforts to identify and explain spatial patterns of where women-owned businesses locate, using Dun & Bradstreet data from the second quarter of 2004. That database includes information on roughly 1.3 million women-owned enterprises and over 12 million enterprises of all types throughout the United States. We have access to these data in a form aggregated to the zipcode level and higher (e.g., county, state).
The questions we are investigating include:
- To what extent are women-owned businesses drawn toward areas with existing concentrations of women-owned enterprises, controlling for industry and other local factors? How does this compare to the local decisions of male-owned enterprises?
- How quickly does the attraction to existing concentrations of male- and women-owned business attenuate with distance?
- How spatially agglomerated are women-owned businesses within a given industry? Is there evidence that women entrepreneurs cluster together, for a variety of possible reasons?
- How do these effects differ across industries, and why?
- Ultimately, what do the spatial patterns of existing and new male- and female-owned enterprises have to say about the importance of professional networks and discrimination in new business creation?
