Urban Structure： Its Role In Urban Growth, Net New Business Formation And Industrial Churn.pdfVIP

_____________________ Région et Développement n° 33-2011 ____________________ URBAN STRUCTURE: ITS ROLE IN URBAN GROWTH, NET NEW BUSINESS FORMATION AND INDUSTRIAL CHURN Bumsoo LEE * and Peter GORDON ** Abstract - Cities are the “engines of growth” because entrepreneurial and cre- ative activities are concentrated in cities. This suggests that cities grow by host- ing new businesses and “churning” industries advantageously. In so doing, cities need to adapt their spatial structure to mitigate negative externalities. Our previous paper (Lee and Gordon 2007) found that the links between urban structure and growth vary across metro size: more clustering in small metros and more dispersion in large metros were associated with faster employment growth. In this paper, we extend our research to investigate to what extent ur- ban spatial structure variables – dispersion and polycentricity – influence net new business formation (NNBF) and industrial “churning” in a cross-section of 79 U.S. metropolitan areas in the 2000s. The results of least squares regression and locally weighted regression analyses are mixed. OLS results for recent years fail to replicate our results for the 1990s. But applying a more powerful LOESS approach does give results for spatial impacts on NNBF and industrial churning that are consistent with the links between spatial structure and urban growth found in the earlier paper. Key- Words: URBAN SPATIAL STRUCTURE, URBAN GROWTH, NET NEW BUSINESS FORMATION (NNBF), INDUSTRIAL CHURN. JEL classification: R1. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support of the University of Southern California’s Lusk Center for Real Estate. The authors are solely responsible for any errors or omissions. * University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA; bumsoo@illinois.edu ** University of