EPRC Seminar: Human Capital and Entrepreneurial Activity in UK City Regions

On 4 May, EPRC hosted a seminar by Jonathan Levie of the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde. Jonathan presented his current research on entrepreneurial activity in UK city regions. Together with Mark Hart from Aston Business School, he looked at how general and specific human capital can explain much of the regional variance in entrepreneurial activity. He uses data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which has been measuring entrepreneurial activity of individuals through large scale surveys across the UK since 1999. Using a combined database for the 2003 to 2009 period, he could estimate entrepreneurial activity rates in 27 city regions across the UK. Human capital varies widely across these city regions. City regions with healthy, educated and commercial populations tend to pull in more entrepreneurial individuals from elsewhere, perpetuating differences in entrepreneurship rates. Jonathan concluded with an outlook on the next steps of their research, which will amongst other things involve an increase of the number of cities in the sample and a multi-level analysis of an individual's propensity to engage in new business activity in city regions. The presentation slides of the seminar are available http://www.eprc.strath.ac.uk/news/Jonathan Levie_4 May.pdf .