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Highly-Educated Immigrant Entrepreneurs' Location Decisions, Nastaran Simarasl

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I draw on theories from sociology, economics, and economic geography, namely ethnic enclave theory, location theory, and heterolocalism theory to investigate factors that highly-educated immigrant entrepreneurs take into account when they decide where to locate their start-up. In doing so, I use an experimental method, conjoint analysis, on a sample of first-generation graduate students at the University of Tennessee to examine the factors that highly-educated aspiring immigrant entrepreneurs take into account when deciding about their start-up location. This dissertation is one of the first studies to bring theories from other disciplines to provide a more comprehensive understanding …