Location Determinants of New Firms: Does Skill Level of Human Capital Really Matter?

This paper is about the role played by the stock of human capital on location decisions of new manufacturing plants. I analyse the effect of several skill levels (from basic school to PhD) on decisions about the location of plants in various industries and, therefore, of different technological levels. I also test whether spatial aggregation level biases the results and determines the most appropriate areas to be considered in the analyses of these phenomena. My main statistical source is the Register of Manufacturing Establishments of Catalonia, which has plant‐level microdata on the locations of new manufacturing plants.