Metropolitan Characteristics and Immigrant Entrepreneurship

It has become more common to find immigrant entrepreneurs not only in immigrant gateway metropolitan areas with large populations, but also in smaller and medium-sized metropolitan areas. As these locational patterns of immigrant businesses emerge, it is more pressing to understand how immigrant entrepreneurship is related to metropolitan characteristics. It is an important issue, as Schumpeter identified long ago that entrepreneurship is deeply embedded in social and economic contexts. In this paper, we extend the study of immigrant entrepreneurship by examining its relationship to individual and city characteristics simultaneously. We focus on city characteristics in order to explain variations among metropolitan areas. Our study is based on 2006 Canadian Public Use Microdata File. We employ a mixed model, as individuals in our sample are nested in various cities. The results clearly demonstrate the importance of including metropolitan characteristics in understanding immigrant entrepreneurship. Implications of findings will be discussed.