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on Cultural Economics |
| By: | Barbara Heebels; Ron Boschma |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the spatial clustering of the book publishing industry. By means of a hazard model, we examine the effect of agglomeration economies and pre-entry entrepreneurial experience on the survival chances of publishing firms. Whereas such survival analyses have been conducted for manufacturing industries, they are still scarce for cultural and service industries. Based on a unique dataset of all book publishers founded between 1880 and 2008 in the Netherlands, the paper demonstrates that the clustering of book publishers in the Amsterdam region did not increase the survival of Amsterdam firms. Instead, prior experience in publishing and related industries had a positive effect on firm survival. The Amsterdam cluster was characterized by high entry and exit levels mainly. Interestingly, the Amsterdam cluster did not function as an attractor for publishing firms from other regions, but rather acted as an incubator for firms that relocated to other regions. |
| Keywords: | evolutionary economic geography, publishing industry, clusters, spinoffs |
| JEL: | O18 R00 L80 |
| Date: | 2010–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egu:wpaper:1007&r=cul |
| By: | McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen |
| Abstract: | Why did the North-Sea folk suddenly get so rich, get so much cargo? The answers seems not to be that supply was brought into equilibrium with demand---the curves were moving out at breakneck pace. Reallocation is not the key. Language is, with its inherent creativity. The Bourgeois Revaluation of the 17th and 18th centuries brought on the modern world. It was the Greatest Externality, and the substance of a real liberalism. Left and right have long detested it, expressing their detestation nowadays in environmentalism. They can stop the modern world, and in some places have. The old Soviet Union was admired even by many economists---an instance of a “cultural contradiction of capitalism,” in which ideas permitted by the successes of innovation rise up to kill the innovation. We should resist it. |
| Keywords: | innovation; bourgeois revaluation; liberalism; success of innovation |
| JEL: | B1 N00 |
| Date: | 2009–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:22925&r=cul |
| By: | Tisdell, Clem; Swarna Nantha, Hemanath |
| Abstract: | The extent to which conservation is feasible is constrained by budgets and the financial sacrifice stakeholders are willing to bear. Therefore a possible objective for conserving a species is to minimise the cost of achieving that stated aim. For example, if a minimum viable population (MVP) of a species is to be conserved, the size and type of habitats reserved for this could be selected to minimise cost. This requires consideration of the comparative (relative) opportunity costs of reserving different land types for conservation. A general model is developed to demonstrate this and is applied to the case of the orangutan. In the ecological literature, recommendations for reserving different types of land for conservation have been based on comparisons of either the absolute economic returns they generate if converted to commercial use or on differences in the density of a species they support. These approaches are shown to be deficient because they ignore relative trade-offs between species population and economic conversion gains at alternative sites. The proposed model for orangutan conservation shows that where land conversion may be impending, the selection of habitats (peat forests or dryland forests or combinations of both) for securing an MVP may in fact be different when comparative costs are factored in than if only absolute values are considered. |
| Keywords: | Comparative costs, Conservation in situ, costs of conservation, environmental policy, minimum viable populations, opportunity costs, orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), Community/Rural/Urban Development, Environmental Economics and Policy, Q01, Q13, Q57, Q58., |
| Date: | 2010–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:uqseee:90466&r=cul |