Understanding the Impact of Intangible Capital on Entrepreneurship at the Regional Level

This paper uses new data for the Spanish case on investment in intangible assets broken down by regions and by type of assets to calibrate the importance of intangible capital for entrepreneurship as a main concern but also to understand which region-specific factors drive entrepreneurship. These new data allow to fill a gap in the literature and contribute to the field of technological entrepreneurial intent by linking entrepreneurship to digitalization and intangible assets of the economy. To this end, the paper presents an index obtained by Principal Component Analysis to measure the regional endowment of intangible capital and analyzes whether the determinants of regional entrepreneurship are driven differently in large and small firms. Using different econometric approaches, the paper finds that for small firms, entrepreneurship is directly related to a prosperity-pull context and the expectation of economic gain. For large firms, the rate of entrepreneurship is also explained by the resources available to firms, such as endowment of intangible capital, stage of technological development, and human capital, as well as the demographic composition of each region.