Specialization Area: 

Economic Development

Currently accepting Ph.D. students.

Biography:

Paige Clayton is an Assistant Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. She is Director of the Masters in City and Regional Planning program. She is Faculty Affiliate of Georgia Tech’s EPIcenter, Affiliate of Georgia Policy Labs at Georgia State University, and Lab Associate of the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She was a Research Fellow with CREATE Research Center at University of North Carolina’s (UNC) Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise from 2020-2022.

Dr. Clayton’s research has attracted funding from the National Science Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Georgia Department of Economic Development. Central themes of Dr. Clayton’s work are the use of quantitative methods to examine how entrepreneurial activities and industries develop within geographic regions, how knowledge is shared across organizations and regions, and to explicate the role of policy. She explores how firms, institutions, intermediaries, policymakers and other stakeholders relate to each other within entrepreneurial regions, set the context for entrepreneurship, and collectively contribute to innovation and to technological and industrial emergence and growth. Her research has direct, practical implications for firms, policymakers and regional planners and leaders. A goal of her work is to help cities and regions effectively pursue technology-based economic development strategies. Her research has been published in Research Policy, Small Business Economics, Academy of Management Perspectives, Journal of Business Venturing Insights, and Journal of Planning Education & Research, among others.

Dr. Clayton joined Georgia Tech in 2020 after completing her MS and PhD in Public Policy at UNC Chapel Hill, where she received the Nancy W. Stegman Fellowship and the Dissertation Completion Fellowship. During her PhD, she held visiting positions at SKEMA Business School (Valbonne, France) and at UCLA’s Department of Geography. Dr. Clayton is a proud Atlanta native and Georgia Tech alumna, having graduated with a BS in Public Policy.

Teaching Interest:

Dr. Clayton teaches core classes in the MCRP curriculum including Economic Analysis in Planning, Economic Development Policy & Practice, Advanced Planning Methods, and History & Theory of Planning. She also teaches Foundations of Urban and Regional Development for undergraduate study abroad (FYSA-Oxford).

Research Interest:

Dr. Clayton's research is at the intersection of the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation, economic development, and science and technology policy.

List of Recent Scholarly Work:

Clayton, P., Liu, C.Y., and Motoyama, Y. 2025. “The (Uneven) Spatial Distribution of Entrepreneurial Support Organizations in the Regional Ecosystem”. Journal of Planning Education & Research.

Clayton, P., Goodspeed, R., Green, J., Lassiter, A., Riggs, W., and B. Wilson. 2024. “More than Analytics: Five Approaches to Educating Professionals to Shape Today’s Digital Cities”. Journal of Planning Education & Research, https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X2412613.

Clayton, P. 2024. “Mentored without incubation: Start-up survival, funding, and the role of 
entrepreneurial support organization services”. Research Policy, 53(4), 104975.

Clayton, P., Feldman, M., & Montmartin, B. 2024. “Financing Regional Industrial Emergence”. Small Business Economics, 62(4), 1493-1521.

Clayton, P. 2024. “Different Outcomes for Different Founders: Local Organizational Sponsorship and Entrepreneurial Finance.” Small Business Economics, 62(1), 23-62.

Degrees with Year of Award:

PhD    Public Policy, 2020
MS    Public Policy, 2017