This paper looks at the issue of access to the arts in terms of the very unequal attendance at and audiences for the high arts by educational grouping. The meaning of equal access is analysed, recent data for two countries, namely the United States and Ireland, are examined and new evidence is...

This paper looks at the issue of the taxation of tobacco: why such taxes are imposed, the structure of these taxes in the EU and the issues to which they give rise. The effects of tobacco and the various measures used by government, including taxation, have been very much in the news in 1997....

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the potential for generating interesting aggregate data on certain aspect of the lives of thousands of composers, and indeed other creative groups, from large on-line dictionaries and to be able to do so relatively quickly. A purpose-built java...

The relationship between conflict and individual artistic output is ambiguous, both a priori and in terms of the evidence. To address this question in relation to composers, we employ a sample of 115 prominent classical composers born after 1800 and attempt to link their annual productivity with...

This paper looks at the arguments for and against admission charges to national museums and provides some new evidence relating to the effects of charges. This debate is set in the context of the policy objective of access: the vast majority of the population do not attend national museums and...

This paper attempts to apply some simple economic analysis to a single national cultural institution, namely the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The first point made is that the Abbey operates within an active and fairly large theatre market in Dublin. Second, it is seen that the Abbey accounts for...

Four central ideas of critical importance in understanding the economies of large central cities in the US can be attributed to Ben Chinitz and other economists who had leading roles in the New York Metropolitan Region Study of 1956-59. Those central ideas are examined in the context in which...

Dick Netzer, a leading public finance economist specializing in state and local issues and urban government, brings together in this comprehensive volume essays by top scholars connecting the property tax with land use. They explore the idea that the property tax is used as a partial substitute...