The impact of accessibility on the location choices of the business services. Evidence from Lyon urban area

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of accessibility on the location choic-es of firms in the business services sector. Distinguishing between Front Office and Back Office services, we estimate multinomial logit models based on the data of Lyon (France) for the year 2011. The results show that the effect of accessibility differs between economic subsectors. In general, Front Office services have a prefer-ence for city centers that are well served by transport infrastructures and, because of the importance of face-to-face interactions, where location externalities are high. Back Office services are sensitive only to the proximity to motorways. In the case of relocations, all establishments tend to locate near to their previous location.