Entrepreneurship and crime: The case of new restaurant location decisions ✩

•Examines the impact of crime on entrepreneurs' decisions to locate new restaurants.•Four types of crime – burglary, assault, rape and murder – are examined.•One million constructed “neighborhoods” in Memphis, Tennessee are studied.•Each crime is positively related to number of new restaurants in a “neighborhood”.•Despite crime, the “neighborhoods” offer benefits to restaurant entrepreneurs.

This paper examines the impact of various violent crimes on restaurant location decisions in a single city, Memphis, TN. Using location information on crimes and newly opened restaurants, we are able to match crimes and restaurants in parcels we construct. We examine the impact of the number of burglaries, assaults, rapes, and murders in each of 400 to up to 1,000,000 parcels occurring from 2009–2013 on the number of restaurants opening in 2014 in models including dummy variables capturing neighborhood effects. Regression results indicate that each crime is positively related to the number of new restaurants in a parcel. This suggests that even with the crime problem, these locations provide sufficient benefits, perhaps population density, which make them attractive to restaurant entrepreneurs.