Does Goliath help David? Anchor firms and startup clusters

Does attracting a “Goliath” firm to a county anchor the growth of regional industry clusters? Matching a hand-collected dataset of major corporate site selection contests to restricted-use U.S. Census microdata, I show that winning a Million Dollar Plant (MDP) generates 2515 net supply chain jobs in the first four years after announcement, declining to 1622 in the subsequent four years. Over the last four years of the panel between four and seven years after the MDP is announced, startups remain the largest contributor to job gains at 1694 jobs, more than offsetting a decline among other incumbents (-61% of the net total), with local incumbents (41%), and affiliated firms (15%) also contributing positively. Post-announcement startups are more numerous but smaller and slower-growing than comparable cohorts in runner-up counties. The two main sources of job creation draw on distinct segments of the local labor market: relative to those in finalist counties, startups in winning counties rely disproportionately on immigrant workers whereas local incumbents employ more local workers, and neither shows evidence of worker flows from the MDP’s corporate network.