Digital Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development: Strategies for Inclusive Growth

Digital transformation has fundamentally altered how businesses are created and operated, offering new pathways for economic participation and growth. While digitalization blurs the geographic boundaries of entrepreneurship, the development of digital businesses remains rooted in local contexts, with important implications for local economic development policy. This dissertation examines how local and regional governments can support digital entrepreneurship, utilizing novel data sources to highlight traditionally underrepresented entrepreneurs who leverage technology to establish and grow their businesses. Comprising three essays, this research explores how policy interventions, local environments, and business owner characteristics shape digital entrepreneurial activities across diverse communities. The first essay investigates the impact of Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) investments on digital economic activity within low- and moderate-income communities, pairing geo-located HUD data and domain-name data from GoDaddy. Drawing on web-scraped data from Etsy, the second essay examines the "maker movement" in Arizona, analyzing how environmental conditions foster creative, online micro-manufacturers. The third essay explores the characteristics, practices, and needs of resource-constrained digital entrepreneurs, utilizing annual surveys conducted by GoDaddy. Collectively, these studies provide methodological and theoretical contributions to public policy and entrepreneurship literature, while offering practical insights for local policymakers reimagining inclusive economic development in the digital age.