Endogenous growth theory in motion: Emergence and development dynamics in the U.S. biotechnology sector

This dissertation builds on the theoretical foundations of endogenous growth theory, Schumpeterian notions of innovation and entrepreneurship and a variety of treatments of time and space. It seeks to develop new empirical details on the evolving dynamics of the emergence and development of the U.S. biotechnology sector. A Random Effects Poisson model with lognormal heterogeneity is employed to test a variety of models developed to explore whether---and if so, the degree to which---a wide variety of region-scale capital assets influence biotechnology firm formation over time. These localized capital assets include bioscience and related human capital, varieties of financial capital---venture capital and federal support for medical schools and academic research institutions---as well as a region's wealth creation capacity in the form of real gross metropolitan product (RGMP) per capita. In addition to offering a more multi-dimensional approach to understanding "space", this research offers a richer treatment of "time" whereby a variety of temporal contexts are distributed unevenly across space.;I find that despite abundant evidence that the global biotechnology sector has been growing and developing for more than three decades, the key formative business dynamics in the United States have been essentially local. There is no evidence of spatial dependencies in the form of imitation among neighboring metro-regional "clusters" measured as new firm births. I conclude by discussing the merits of extending these theoretical refinements of endogenous growth dynamics to the experiences of other emerging technology-intensive industries.