Firms and Regional Innovation

Abstract

This senior thesis paper examines the role of firms in driving regional innovation. Building on long-standing theoretical frameworks for understanding regional economic growth and combined with recent empirical work. Expanding on a 2017 paper (Berkes and Gaetani, 2017) which examined the connection between population density and the density of patents within a region, I study the density of firms as another potential driver of regional innovation. In doing so, we will be able to further disentangle the myriad of complex factors that drive the innovation and growth of regions. The results of this study will carry broad economic and public policy implications. First, it will help expand our understanding of the consequences for American innovation caused by the decline in the number of large, publicly-traded American companies. In addition, the findings of this study can be informative for state-and-local policymakers to better understand optimal strategies to spur greater regional private sector innovation within their jurisdictions.