Darja Reuschke has a new paper on city economies and microbusiness growth, published in Urban Studies (online before print): http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0042098016680520
This paper assesses the influence of city location and running a business from home on microbusiness growth, based on empirical analysis of panel firm-level data over a four-year period. The analysis reveals that cities provide benefits to microbusinesses for turnover growth but not for employment growth – suggesting that the additional growth induced by cities for microbusinesses may be jobless growth. However, in the case of microbusinesses run from the owner’s home, cities facilitate growth into medium-sized businesses. The paper concludes that microbusinesses, including those run from business owners’ homes, are integral to the evolution and dynamics of urban economies and essential to understanding the nature of growth in cities.