Journal of Cultural Economics最新文献

Despite consensus in the literature regarding the importance of culture and arts, as well as their vulnerability to economic shocks, few empirical studies assess the degree to which they have been affected adversely by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study thus quantitatively measures the impact of COVID-19 on people’s cultural engagement in South Korea. Various econometric methods are applied to South Korea’s large-scale Culture and Arts Activity Survey dataset, which is nationally representative and provides micro-level detail. Results suggest that COVID-19 made South Korean people substantially and significantly less likely to participate in cultural and arts activities—by 15 to 17 percentage points for venue activities and 24 to 25 percentage points for outdoor activities. Strong heterogeneity, however, seems to exist depending on an individual’s gender, age, education, income, and early exposure to the arts. Interestingly, the pandemic rather raised people’s likelihood of visiting a library, which serves as a safer cultural outlet, and the number of movies watched through digital media increased. Remarkably, the results from quantile count regression suggest that frequent goers were more affected. However, there is preliminary evidence indicating an exception for ‘very frequent goers’ (highly engaged individuals at the 90th percentile level from the bottom) who may not have much compromised their consumption of culture and arts despite the challenging circumstances brought on by the pandemic.

Intellectual property rights have changed the market value and direction of artistic innovation throughout art history, in particular when new creations built on the art of predecessors. In this paper, we test how changes in legal frameworks and litigation risks affected market value and commercial trade around artistic reuses in the figurative arts and the 'Appropriation Art' movement in particular. Appropriation artists borrow images from different sources and incorporate them into new, derivative works of art. By doing so, they risk infringing copyright but also put auction trade and artwork availability at litigation risk as liability can extend to market intermediaries, such as auction houses, museums, or galleries. Using a differences-in-differences model and large-scale online data, we investigate the causal impact of the prominent Cariou v. Prince U.S. higher court decision on intermediary trade and the availability of artworks on sale in the Appropriation Art. As an exogenous shock, this decision changed the perceived litigation risk for market intermediaries around what constitutes fair use. Following the court decision, we find a temporary decline in the total number of global auctions in the Appropriation Art, a lower sales probability of these artworks, and a relocation of related auctions to non-U.S. houses.

In this study, we test for the impact of the Affordable Care Act’s dependent coverage expansion on the career choices of young college graduates with majors in the arts in the United States. Since working as an artist often involves employment arrangements like self-employment and project-based work that lack health insurance coverage, policies that expand access to health insurance have the potential to make employment in the arts more attractive for arts graduates. Using American Community Survey data, we use a difference-in-differences regression approach comparing the likelihood of working in the arts for college graduates with majors in the arts who are just under- and just over-26, pre- and post-implementation of the ACA’s dependent coverage expansion. We find that the ACA increased the likelihood that arts graduates under 26 years of age were working in the arts by over 2% points, effects that are statistically significant and large as less than 20% of arts graduates in our sample work in the arts. Such changes are not observed for other graduates, suggesting that this response is unique to arts graduates, who are often found to behave differently than other workers.

This study verifies whether the number of criteria of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) satisfied by a site in the UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) can be considered as an ordinal measure of its quality against the alternative hypotheses that: a) quality can be measured just dichotomously, by inclusion in the WHL); b) the multiplicity of existing OUV is just meant to capture alternative aesthetic criteria expressed by different cultures. This issue is important for both scientific and policy reasons. To avoid problems of endogeneity and reverse causality, we examine the correlation between the number of satisfied criteria and the evaluation of the site’s quality made by an authoritative travel guidebook that pre-existed UNESCO, the Baedeker’s guide of the early twentieth century. Exploiting a newly assembled dataset on 234 UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS) in 10 European countries from 11 Baedeker’s guidebooks, from 1899 to 1911, we proxy the Baedeker’s evaluations of quality by four measures: (1) total number of citations of the site; (2) weighted number of citations; (3) average length of the paragraphs with at least one citation; and (4) sentiment expressed in the text. All these measures appear positively and significantly correlated with the number of UNESCO criteria that the site satisfies, using a variety of strategies and robustness checks, confirming that they are an informative ordinal proxy for the quality of UNESCO WHS. Moreover, this analysis brings evidence to bear on the debate about the formation and persistence of UNESCO experts’ evaluations over time.

Manipulations in classical music competitions are a proven problem that has as yet not been eradicated from the competition practice. Several examples are provided. We aim to compare and analyze different methods of reducing manipulation in classical music competitions, focusing on outlier scores and on outlier jurors. First, we investigate the typical approach of correcting or discarding individual jurors' scores that significantly deviate from the mean or median of scores received by a given candidate. We then introduce a new method that involves the exclusion of outlier jurors (EOJ). This approach implies that all scores of jurors with ratings that substantially differ from those of other jurors are removed and not taken into account when determining the ranking of candidates. The properties of both approaches are discussed in hypothetical voting scenarios, where one or more jurors assign scores that deviate markedly from those awarded by other jurors. Finally, we present examples of applying various methods to real-world data from classical music competitions, demonstrating the potential effectiveness and implications of each approach in reducing manipulation within these events. Two examples are taken from the International Karol Szymanowski Music Competition, which took place in September 2023 in Katowice, Poland, where EOJ was adopted for the first time as the official scoring system in four competition categories: piano, violin, vocal, and string quartet.