Business establishment mobility behavior in urban areas: a microanalytical model for the City of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada

We present a microanalytical firm mobility model for the City of Hamilton, Canada, developed with data from the Statistics Canada Business Register. Contributing to the scarce literature on firm migration behavior, we explore and model the determinants of mobility among small and medium size firms who retained less than 200 employees between 1996 and 1997. Our exploratory results suggest that short distance moves are more common and tend to occur among smaller firms. Econometric modeling results support these assertions and indicate that the willingness to move can be explained by a firm’s internal characteristics (e.g. age, size, growth and industry type) as well as location factors related to the urban environment where the firm is located. The modeling results will serve as input for the development of an agent-based firmographic decision support system that can be used to inform the planning process in the study area.