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...

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....

This paper examines the 522 most important composers in the last 800 years, as identified by Murray (2003), in terms of their birth location and migration. It also looks at detailed patterns of migration and tendencies to cluster in certain cities for those composers born from 1750 to 1899. This...

I investigate the consequences of long-run persistency of a society’s preferences for cultural goods. Historical cultural activity is approximated with the frequency of births of music composers during the Renaissance and is linked with contemporary measures of cultural activity in Italian...

This study posits that there may be a strong relationship between the high degree of protectionism of the Swiss housing market and its stability. The article provides an overview of the Swiss housing policies that, it is argued, are highly conservative in the context of an international...

The importance of cultural events for attracting tourism has been often posited in research, however rarely tested in relation to non-cultural activities. This paper investigates the association between participation in entertainment activities and tourism flows in Italian provinces, and find...

It is difficult to estimate the impact of geographic clustering on productivity because of endogeneity issues. I use birthplace–cluster distance as an instrumental variable for the incidence of clustering of prominent classical composers born between 1750 and 1899. I find that geographic...

The importance of cultural events for attracting tourism has been often posited in research, however rarely tested in relation to non-cultural activities. We investigate the association between participation in entertainment activities and tourism flows in Italian provinces, and find that...

In this paper, we explore whether, and to what extent, the incidence of war affects the migration intensity of 164 prominent classical composers born after 1800. We model the aggregate stock of composers in a country and find that periods of war correspond negatively with the number of artists....