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 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....

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...

This paper analyses the determinants of the demand for life insurance using sample data from the 1911 Census of Canada. We find that immigrants’ demand for life insurance was on average around seven percent lower than that of native born Canadians and varied depending on the time that elapsed...

In this article we study the determinants of decision rights transfer and its effects on the motivation of an agent. The study is based on a laboratory experiment conducted on 130 subjects playing an innovative principal-agent game. Interestingly, the results show that agents do not favour a...

This article provides an applied investigation of video game users. We estimate zero-inflated ordered probit models to control for an excess of zeros in our ordinal dependent variable. We find that video games playing is not negatively associated with the involvement in other cultural practices....

I investigate the consequences of long-run persistence of a societies’ preference towards cultural goods. Historical cultural activity is approximated with the frequency of births of classical composers during the Renaissance and is linked with contemporary supply of cultural activities in...

The well-being of a person is reflected in the language used. Building on 1,400 letters written by three famous music composers, I obtain well-being indices that span their lifetime. The validity of this methodology is shown by linking the indices with biographical information and through...