European clusters for New Space Economy

This paper aims to provide new evidence on the effects of industrial clusters on the emergence of new sectors. We exploit a novel and unique dataset that combines data on New Space Economy startups in Europe, founded between 2003 and 2023, with the presence of an anchor tenant (industrial and academic), regionalized space clusters and region-level economic data for a sample of universities and firms located in geographical areas at the third level of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS3), which respond to a sub-regional scale of analysis. Our results should indicate that the presence of space clusters favours the heterogeneous creation of firms belonging to the New Space economy. In particular, we may find that the birth of startups belonging to the upstream segment is more closely related to its location in space-related industrial clusters and the presence of an anchor tenant in the region where the startup is founded.