Spatial Warsaw Seminars – Season Five
With the beginning of the new semester, we warmly invite you to attend the Spatial Warsaw Research Center lectures. The first speaker of the fifth season will be Keli Araujo-Rocha, a PhD candidate at the University of Rovira i Virgili. She will present a study titled "High-tech firms’ location in emerging economies: Evidence from the Campinas Metropolitan Region and São Paulo State" (the abstract of the presentation is provided below).
The lecture will take place on 25 February at 15:00 in a hybrid format. We warmly encourage you to attend in person at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, room B301. Those interested in attending online are kindly asked to contact Dr Kateryna Zabarina (xmnk-!H6GwWYi^odQ0&.*`3]#[dhPNir.!!4OHOge\Zph~3Qz) to receive the link to the meeting.
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This paper examines the determinants of high-tech firm location in the Campinas Metropolitan Region (RMC) and compares them with patterns observed across the 645 municipalities of São Paulo state. Using municipal-level firm entry data for 2021-2024 and baseline regional indicators measured in 2020, the analysis is grounded in the Regional Innovation System (RIS) framework. To account for the count nature and overdispersion of firm entry data, this paper employs pooled negative binomial regressions with year fixed effects, clustering standard errors at the municipal level. Poisson specifications are estimated as a benchmark to formally test for overdispersion and assess robustness. The results indicate that industrial diversity, knowledge infrastructure – particularly the presence of universities – and metropolitan hierarchy are central determinants of high-tech entry. Core metropolitan cities, especially Campinas, exhibit systematically higher entry rates, highlighting the role of urban centrality and institutional coordination. In contrast, non-core municipalities within the RMC do not uniformly outperform the broader state pattern. Overall, the findings contribute to the RIS literature by providing evidence from an emerging economy and offer policy-relevant insights for place-based innovation strategies in Brazil.