Go West Young Firm: The Impact of Startup Migration on the Performance of Migrants

Abstract

This paper studies how regional migration to tech clusters impacts the performance of startups within the United States. Startups that move to Silicon Valley experience a significant improvement in performance. This improvement is higher than migrations to other regions in the United States, many of which report null treatment effects. The startups that benefit the most from migration are those leaving low performing entrepreneurial ecosystems and moving to high performing ecosystems, consistent with an agglomeration mechanism. Within different measures of the ecosystem, the level of local patenting predicts startup improvements more than venture capital or the quality-adjusted number of startups, suggesting the local innovation environment is more important to migrant performance than financing or the presence of other startup peers. This paper was accepted by Toby Suart, entrepreneurship and innovation. Funding: This work was supported by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Jean Hammond (1986) and Michael Krasner (1974) Entrepreneurship Fund at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Edward B. Roberts (1957) Entrepreneurship Fund at MIT. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4924 .