ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography 2022; aop Open Access. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Franziska Sohns*, Dariusz Wójcik Do they do as they say? Analysing the Impact of Brexit on Relocation Intentions in the UK’s FinTech Industry https://doi.org/10.1515/zfw-2021-0049 Received: 14. October 2021; accepted: 12. Dezember 2022 Abstract: This paper responds to Bathelt and Li’s (2020) call for selecting more appropriate methods and improving their rigour by evaluating the feasibility of using factorial surveys to anticipate future relocation behaviour. By utilis- ing a case study approach, focussing on Brexit and the UK FinTech industry, the paper examines to what extent busi- ness managers’ relocation intentions are driven by factors similar to those known to drive actual relocation behaviour and compares business managers’ relocation intentions with their companies’ actual relocation outcomes. We use a factorial survey conducted in 2018, which allows us to quantitatively analyse the impact of different Brexit sce- narios and selected company characteristics on business managers’ likelihood to intend to relocate their UK busi- ness unit (or some functions thereof ) to the EU and/or the US. Additionally, we collected qualitative secondary data on the actual relocation outcomes of the surveyed companies in February 2022 by investigating online platforms, such as LinkedIn, Companies House, and Crunchbase, as well as company webpages. The results of this mixed-methods approach highlight a significant variation in business man- agers’ intentions, and the importance of geographical and institutional proximity for relocation intentions and out- comes. We show that business managers’ relocation inten- tions are driven by factors similar to those known to drive actual relocation behaviour, such as their perception of the economic consequences of different Brexit scenarios, their territorial embeddedness, as well as their nationality. Most importantly, our findings indicate that, although factorial surveys are only moderately accurate when predicting the exact extent and destination of actual relocation, they are highly accurate when predicting whether a company relo- cates or not. Acknowledgments: We would like to acknowledge all par- ticipants of the “Regions in Recovery Global E-Festival”, which took place from the 2 nd to 18 th of June 2021, for their constructive comments that helped to finalize this article. Moreover, we would like to thank the anonymous review- ers whose constrictive comments helped to improve the article. 1 Introduction Climate change is altering weather patterns that were perceived as predictable, the long-forgotten threat of an armed conflict between the United States of America (US) and Russia is suddenly looming again, and a global pan- demic is sweeping around the globe, while the Fourth Industrial Revolution is shifting the way we live and work in ways difficult to fully comprehend. It increasingly seems like what had been perceived as established patterns for decades is rather temporary and increasingly unpredicta- ble in nature. In such an uncertain world, anticipating the future correctly and making well-informed decisions has become an important comparative advantage not just for economic but also for political actors. As representatives of an applied research discipline, positioned right in-be- tween economics and social sciences (Martin and Sunley, 2001), economic geographers have always been predestined to make sense of the multi-layered and complex nature of the world, aiming to contribute to the political debate by offering policy recommendations in a timely and relevant manner. As a result, “the discipline has adopted a toolkit of diverse research methods over time” (Bathelt and Li, 2020:3), leading to significant methodological pluralism. While methodological pluralism offers opportunities, such as the ability to pursue a wider range of research ideas, it also comes with challenges, such as the need to ensure rigour in choosing adequate research methods and utilising them correctly. Well-established in social science (Hox et al., 1991), with a recent application in economic geography (Neise and Revilla Diez, 2018), factorial survey approaches, combining elements of traditional survey research and behavioural experiments into a single method, are one of the latest addi- *Corresponding author: Dr. Franziska Sohns is an Associate Professor in Economic Geography at Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge, CB1 1PT; E-mail: franziska.sohns@aru.ac.uk. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5641-7433 Dr. Dariusz Wójcik is a Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY; E-mail: dariusz.wojcik@ouce.ox.ac.uk