We track the movement of high-potential startups using cross-state business registrations and estimate the utility of cities to moving startups using a revealed preference approach. 6.6% of these startups move across state borders during their first five years. Startup hubs like Silicon Valley and Boston tend to lose startups to other cities. Our findings show that startups prefer traditional hubs when they move soon after being founded, but later prefer cities with lower taxes. This pattern is not due to vertical sorting or industrial specialization.

We investigate underlying sources of the US entrepreneurial ecosystem's advantage compared to other innovative economies by assessing the benefits that Israeli startups derive from migrating to the United States. Addressing positive sorting into migration, we show that migrants raise larger funding amounts and are more likely to have a U.S. trademark and be acquired than nonmigrants. Migrants also achieve a higher acquisition value. However, their patent output is not larger. We conclude that the United States entrepreneurial ecosystem's advantage vis-à-vis other innovative economies arises from several sources producing sizeable gains for startups. These sources are investor availability as well as large consumer and acquisitions markets.

ABSTRACT Republicans start more firms than Democrats. In a sample of 40 million party‐identified Americans between 2005 and 2017, we find that 5.5% of Republicans and 3.7% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time‐varying—Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations, amounting to a partisan reallocation of 170,000 new firms over our 13‐year sample. We find sharp changes in partisan entrepreneurship around the elections of President Obama and President Trump, with the strongest effects among the most politically active partisans: those that donate and vote.