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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (6 results)

  • Article
Policy Briefs (2013)
Business incubators are a widely used economic development policy tool which aim to nurture and support the development of small, often high‐technology oriented firms within local economies. In a short period of time, business incubators have become a very popular mechanism aimed at engendering economic growth in local economies, not only in the US, but also around the world. In 1980, there were only 12 business incubators in the US; by 2006, this number had grown to more than 1,000 (Qian et al. 2011).  In this paper, we detail the emergence of business incubators in the US and outline the rationale underlying the wholesale arrival of incubators as an economic development policy tool. We then provide a descriptive account of business incubators in Metropolitan Los Angeles, which outlines where within the region incubators are located, what goals they seek to achieve, what services they provide, and what industries they target. Finally, we draw from a number of studies to examine the impact of business incubators, to determine how successful they are as an economic development policy tool. 
    Cover page: Business Incubators in Metropolitan Los Angeles: Job Creators or Boondoggles?
    • Thesis
    • Peer Reviewed
    UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2015)

    Regional economic development is shaped by the growth dynamics of certain industries. The forces that shape industrial location across regions reflect the demand by industries for a particular region, which is determined by the economic geography of an industry, and the comparative advantage of the region for that industry. Large metropolitan regions are not uniformly attractive to key industries, but instead offer a wide range of different locational attributes. Within metropolitan regions, decision-making is fragmented across myriad local governments. These governments (cities and their planning and economic development activities) act in a disjointed manner to shape where industries locate. Thus, local authorities may have effects on industrial location and efficiency that go beyond their borders, as they shape the geography of the industry in the region as a whole. The changing geography of the information technology (IT) industry in the San Francisco Bay Area, the home of Silicon Valley, is a key example of the intersection of the economic geography of an industry with local economic development policies. The IT industry has dispersed from its original home in Santa Clara County, around the broader 10-county metropolitan region. In 1990, cities in Santa Clara County were home to 71% of the region’s IT jobs; in 2010, they were home to 57% of these jobs. This dissertation finds that land use regulation has shaped the geography of the industry within the regional economy and considers the effects of this evolution. The principal contribution of this dissertation is to bring together two bodies of theory and evidence that are typically considered in isolation from one another: local land use and economic development actions and economic geography. By doing this, it allows consideration of how uncoordinated local actions pertaining to land use and economic development might affect the performance of an industry that functions at a metropolitan scale, and hence reevaluate the actions of local planners in terms of wider regional economic development effects.

      Cover page: The Shadow of Silicon Valley: The Dispersion of the Information Technology Industry Throughout The San Francisco Bay Area, 1990-2010
      • Article
      Policy Briefs (2018)
        Cover page: Motivations for Growth Revolts: Discretion and Pretext as Sources of Development Conflict
        • Article
        Reports (2020)
        We estimated the off-street parking supply of the seven most economically productive cities in Santa Clara County, California, better known as Silicon Valley. Using assessor data, municipal zoning data, and visual inspection with aerial imagery, we estimated that about 14 percent of the land area in these cities is devoted to parking, and that over half the average commercial parcel are parking spaces. This latter fact suggested that minimum parking requirements, if binding, could depress Silicon Valley’s commercial and industrial densities, and; thus, its productivity. In an exploratory empirical exercise, we simulated a reduction in parking requirements from the year 2000 forward, and showed that under conservative assumptions, the region could have added space for an additional 12,886 jobs, which is 43 percent of the actual job growth that occurred during that time. These additional jobs would be disproportionately located in the region’s highest-wage zip codes, further implying a large productivity gain.
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UCCONNECT (2016)
          The San Francisco Bay Area regularly experiences some of the most severe traffic congestion in the U.S. This past year both Inrix and the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) ranked the Bay Area third only to Washington D.C. and Los Angeles in the time drivers spend stuck in traffic. The TTI estimated that traffic congestion cost the Bay Area economy a staggering $3.1 billion in 2014 (Lomax et al., 2015). Such estimates are based on the premise that moving more slowly than free-flow speeds wastes time and fuel, and that these time and fuel costs multiplied over millions of travelers in large urban areas add up to billions of dollars in congestion costs. But while few among us like driving in heavy traffic, do such measures really capture how congestion and the conditions that give rise to it affect regional economies? This study explores this question for the San Francisco Bay Area by examining how traffic congestion is (i) related to a broader and more conceptually powerful concept of access and (ii) how it affects key industries, which are critical to the performance of the region’s economy.
            Cover page: Not So Fast: A Study of Traffic Delays, Access, and Economic Activity in the San Francisco Bay Area
            • Article
            Policy Briefs (2016)
              Cover page: Not So Fast: Traffic Delays, Access, and Economic Activity in Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area
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