In the last decade policy makers and scholars have highlighted creative industries’ capacity to stimulate economic dynamism. However, there is still some debate about the potential effect of reverse causality on this relationship, as CIs may also be attracted to successful areas. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to disentangle the role played by the existing spatial concentration of these kinds of activity on new firm creation. In order to deal with this potential reverse causality issue this paper relies on an instrumental variable approach. The main statistical source is the REIC (Catalan Manufacturing Establishments Register), which has plant-level microdata on the location of plants in Catalan municipalities between 2002 and 2007. By using, for the first time, the foundation of cultural associations and urban population as historical instrumental variables, the results confirm CIs’ potential for new firm creation. JEL classifications: R39, Z100 Keywords: creative industries, cultural associations, industrial location, IV