Immigration and Entrepreneurship: The Role of Enclaves
研究了英国波兰移民的聚居区如何影响移民创业，发现移民增加创业但不在现有聚居区内，而聚居区外的创业者增长更差，原因在于劳动力市场受阻和生存型创业更普遍。
Immigration has proven to be a major force driving entrepreneurial dynamics. In this paper I investigate how the geographical distribution of immigrants within a given country, and in particular the presence of “enclaves,” affects the relationship between immigration and entrepreneurship. I examine the impact of Polish immigration to Great Britain following the unprecedented migration wave caused by the European Union enlargement in 2004. I address omitted variable concerns by using information on the location of historical Polish military settlements and the occupational composition and growth of Polish immigration in Ireland to construct instruments for enclaves and location choices of immigrants. The econometric results indicate, on the one hand, that immigration does increase immigrant entrepreneurship, but not in existing immigrant enclaves. On the other hand, immigrant entrepreneurs outside enclaves tend to achieve worse growth outcomes than those in enclaves. Further analyses provide an explanation to these findings due to blocked labor markets and to the higher prevalence of “necessity entrepreneurship” outside of enclaves. These results offer new insights to understand the influence of geography on entrepreneurship in the presence of immigration. This paper was accepted by Toby Stuart, entrepreneurship and innovation. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4776 .