In the last decade policy makers and scholars have highlighted the capacity of creative industries to stimulate economic growth. However, there is still some debate about the potential effect of reverse causality on this relationship, as creative industries 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. 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, cultural associations as historical instrumental variables, the results confirm the po­tential of creative service industries (CSIs) for creating new firms.