Regional influences on the prevalence of family versus non-family start-ups

•The importance of the regional context for different kinds of start-ups.•Economic factors (e.g., regional income per capita) are important for non-family start-ups.•Non-economic factors (e.g., favourable community attitudes toward small businesses) are important for family start-ups.•Highlights the importance of the “geographic context” for entrepreneurship research.

We integrate insights from family business and organizational ecology into the entrepreneurship field by constructing a theoretical framework that explains how the regional context impacts family and non-family start-ups in differing ways. Regional count data models based on a rich longitudinal dataset reveal that while economic factors such as population size and growth in regions are primarily associated with the number of non-family start-ups, factors related to regional embeddedness, such as pre-existing small family businesses as well as favorable community attitudes toward small businesses, are more strongly associated with the number of family start-ups. Our research provides support for the notion that ‘the regional context’ is an important yet under-theorized area for research on venture creation and family business.