Go West Young Firm: The Value of Entrepreneurial Migration for Startups and Their Founders

I study the benefits to entrepreneurial migration, focused on firms moving to Silicon Valley. Using a machine learning estimator and panel data, I find moving to Silicon Valley leads to higher startup performance on equity outcomes, financing, patenting, products, and revenue. These results are robust to a stringent coefficient stability test, and show no evidence of pre-trends. The benefits are partially driven by knowledge spillovers, and sensitive to capital market conditions during migration. Despite the benefits to migration, most startups do not move. A simple analysis suggests this may be due to the personal costs of moving for founders themselves