Journal of Cultural Economics最新文献

Ninety-day exclusive theatrical windows have been threatened by the age of streaming and the COVID-19 pandemic. Some studios have adopted earlier secondary release strategies, leading to conflicts with talent. However, the extent to which this has impacted box office performance remains unclear. Using a two-stage difference-in-difference analysis, we show that when a film is made available on a secondary channel, it is shown in fewer theatres and has a lower theatrical gross. An event study suggests that the impact increases, the longer the film remains available on a secondary channel. We discuss the implications for both distributors and exhibitors.

Since the late 90 s, the literature on the role of culture in the development of cities has grown. A first issue of this literature is to analyse the direction of the causality between the location of people and the one of cultural activities. The second issue is to measure the non-market values produced by cultural assets in cities. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of cultural amenities on students' future interurban location choice by using the discrete choice experiment method. The latter is used to address the two issues raised in the literature by modelling a location choice between cities that differ in terms of the living environment offered, and in particular the budget allocated to cultural facilities. Our data concerns students surveyed in 2018 in the city of Angers (France). Our results highlight the existence of a willingness to pay for living after graduation in a city with a budget devoted to cultural facilities which is above the average for the medium-sized French cities. We also observe a heterogeneity of students’ preferences according to their index of current cultural awareness created using a cluster analysis. Indeed, the more culturally aware students currently are, the more they will be willing to pay to live in a city offering an increased cultural budget. Finally, we observe a difference in willingness to pay depending on the faculty in which the student is enrolled, with the lowest one for students in Sciences, Engineering and Health.

This study seeks to identify the factors that moderate pre-electoral increases in culture budgets of small, rural municipalities, using a panel sample of 876 Austrian municipalities for the period 2010 to 2019. Whenever politicians increase public funding to mobilize their constituencies in the run-up to elections, they create cycles in the financial figures. These so-called political business cycles (PBCs) are manifestations of the incumbents’ pre-electoral mobilization efforts and allow to concisely study fiscal approaches to voter activation. Citizens of small municipalities have concentrated preferences and a relatively pronounced propensity for cultural goods, so the mere existence of PBCs in municipal cultural spending is not contentious. However, what are the factors that influence the cumulative financial output of get-out-the-vote efforts? In deduction of established literature on electoral politics, I hypothesize that the extent of the PBCs in municipal cultural spending is moderated by electoral competition and fragmentation, while the mayor’s ideology should not be a significant moderating influence. The results of the dynamic panel model provide evidence in favour of these expectations, except for political fragmentation, which does not seem to be determinative of PBCs. The conclusion is that increasing the culture budget seems to be a much-used allocative method of voter mobilization in competitive elections, which puts the commonplace that small communities lack political competition into question. By researching the policymakers’ propensity to make top-down fiscal value propositions in the run-up to elections, the study characterizes the strategic timing in budgetary politics and assesses the contextual factors of materialist political considerations in today’s era of post-materialism.

Quantitative analysis of narratives of art history published since 2000 reveals that scholars and critics now judge that Andy Warhol has surpassed Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns as the most important modern American painter. Auction prices indicate that collectors share this opinion. Disaggregation by decade reveals that Warhol first gained clear critical recognition as the leading Pop artist in the 1990s, then as the most important American artist overall in the 2000s. This rise in Warhol’s status appears initially to have been a result of his influence on Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and others in the cohort that transformed the New York art world in the 1980s, and subsequently of his persisting influence on leading artists around the world who have emerged since the 1990s, including Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and Ai Weiwei. Warhol’s many radical conceptual innovations that transformed both the appearance of art and the behavior of artists made him not only the most important American artist, but the most important Western artist overall of the second half of the twentieth century.

U.S. state-designated cultural districts are modern place-based policies that leverage local arts and culture to foster economic growth. While their use is increasing, with more than 375 extant in eighteen states, large-scale evaluations of their efficacy are scarce or non-existent. This study, which relies on geocoded establishment data, finds a modest but persistent increase in employment for some in-district establishments relative to same-industry establishments located beyond district boundaries. The most effective district-implemented incentives for expanding employment appear to be direct grants to establishments, while sales tax credits also show potential benefits.

We estimate gender earnings differentials among Hollywood stars. While this market should be particularly efficient in translating productivity into earnings, we demonstrate an unexplained female earnings gap of over two million dollars a film. Critically, we show that action films drive this gap. Our movie fixed effects estimate a much larger-million-dollar gap among action movies and a smaller statistically insignificant gap among other genres. Within the other genres, the one significant earnings gap is among stars older than 50. We argue that these patterns could reflect “consumer discrimination” but also raise other possibilities.

Have you ever wished that you were a superhero? If so, how much would you be willing to pay to become one? In this study, we measured the economic value of becoming a superhero or obtaining a superpower using a discrete choice experiment. We focused on four superpowers: mind-control, flight, teleportation, and supernatural physical strength and measured values for each power. Our results indicate that of the four powers, our participants valued teleportation the most.

Cultural consumption has increasingly acquired a fundamental role in urban policy frameworks, thanks to its empirically proven positive effects on individuals and on societies. Although several theoretical and empirical contributions have examined the main socio-economic determinants that explain cultural consumption; its spatial dimensions remain significantly under-considered and require further analysis. The aim of this paper is to analyse the factors influencing cultural consumption with a focus on spatial distance and spatial dependence. Specifically, it seeks to inquire into the extent to which spatial distance between consumers and cultural institutions plays a role in neighbourhood’s levels of cultural consumption. To do this, human mobility data towards cultural institutions are used as a proxy for individual cultural consumption levels in six French cities. Results show that spatial proximity with the cultural offer matters in explaining consumption patterns, but that traditional socioeconomic determinants have a higher explanatory value.

Abstract

Music streaming changed the recorded music industry’s business model from individual product sales to unlimited on-demand access subscriptions. The streaming platforms experienced strong growth during the 2010s and now drive most of the industry’s revenue, up to 90% in the most mature markets. Until recently, the payment system for rights holders had remained unchanged. Many industry stakeholders criticise the system’s alleged unfairness, and artist organisations, independent labels and major labels all propose different ideas to ‘fix’ the music streaming payment system. The current ‘pro-rata’ payment system pools all subscription fees, with each rights holder receiving a payment proportional to their share of the accumulated number of streams. The system does not look to align the individual users’ payments with their actual musical preferences and consumption. Therefore, this paper defines the problem of the current music streaming payment system as its allocation of equal value on all streams. The paper proposes a framework to systematically evaluate alternative payment systems inspired by policy analysis and planning. It additionally contributes with a structured evaluation of six alternative payment systems that rethinks how streams are calculated and remunerated to restore the price discrimination between different listening behaviours. The paper finds that developing a mixture of the alternative systems can likely solve many of the current system’s challenges. Furthermore, the paper analyses and discusses the new payment system changes to be implemented on Deezer and Spotify.

Cultural economics has largely looked toward environmental economics and used non-market valuation techniques such as contingent valuation to estimate the total economic value of cultural goods. These methods are well suited to the valuation of cultural heritage goods, where the benefits are mostly related to the level of supply and mainly take the form of existence and bequest values. This stands in contrast to cultural institutions such as theatres, libraries, exhibitions, and concerts, where the value is produced, when the goods are consumed. For this type of cultural goods, I suggest that cultural economics rather turn to find inspiration in the economics of education. The value of schooling can be divided into private returns and social returns (human capital externalities). Likewise, the value of cultural consumption can have a private and a public component, where I suggest labeling the public component cultural capital externalities. The idea is that when private consumption of arts and culture is taking place, the individual will accumulate cultural capital. This accumulated cultural capital can impact other people (e.g., through changed behavior, future decisions or interactions) and create externalities, i.e., the cultural capital externalities. The size of the externalities is expected to increase (or decrease) with the level of consumption. Without the consumption by the users, no externalities are produced. While this is one of the most fundamental arguments for cultural policy, it has not yet been extensively studied within cultural economics.