‘California is the capital of American business.”

That’s the view of Steven Davidoff Solomon, a law professor at UC Berkeley and regular contributor to The New York Times’ Deal Professor column, who came to the conclusion after analyzing where public companies call home. He found that 20 percent of the companies on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq market are based in California. That’s twice the level of the 1960s and ’70s.

The northern part of the state is clearly driving that growth. Three of the five largest companies in the United States by market cap – Apple, Facebook, and Google – are based in the Bay Area. (The other two, Amazon and Microsoft, are in the Pacific Northwest, about as far from New York, the historic center of American commerce, as one can get.)

And Los Angeles? While the lure of California has long drawn entrepreneurs of all stripes, our roster of public companies has shrunk over the last few decades.

Does it matter? Public companies are just one measure of the robustness of a region’s economy. The tech and biotech sectors are helping drive L.A.’s growth, the same industries that are feeding the increase in California’s public companies. Counting chief executives living here is not the sole measure of a region’s vitality. Indeed, it is a testament to the L.A. business community’s creativity and entrepreneurialism that multinationals looking to add to their portfolios come shopping here. (See Unilever’s $1 billion purchase of Dollar Shave Club and Tessera’s $850 million deal for DTS Inc.)

All of this corporate growth, of course, comes in a high-tax, high-regulation state. That clearly factors into decisions about where to start a business, as does the high cost of housing here. But those costs are apparently outweighed by the infrastructure, educational institutions, and magnet of being a part of some of the nation’s most wildly successful businesses in one of largest economies in the world.