|
on Cultural Economics |
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Issue of 2014‒02‒08
three papers chosen by Roberto Zanola Universita' del Piemonte Orientale Amedeo Avogadro |
| By: | Brahim Boualam |
| Abstract: | Does a better cultural milieu make a city more livable for residents and improve its business environment for firms? I compute a measure of cultural specialization for 346 U.S. metropolitan areas and ask if differences in cultural environment capitalize into housing price and wage differentials. Simple correlations replicate standard results from the literature: cities that are more specialized in cultural occupations enjoy higher factor prices. Estimations using time-series data, controlling for city characteristics and correcting for endogeneity weaken the magnitude of this effect. Even though the arts and culture might be appealing to some people and firms, such determinants are not strong enough to affect factor prices at the city level. |
| Keywords: | Urban economics, location choice, local amenities, culture. |
| Date: | 2014–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gen:geneem:14012&r=cul |
| By: | Turner, Robert (Department of Economics, Colgate University); Willmarth, Blake (Department of Economics, Colgate University) |
| Abstract: | We present the results of a new, tournament-style design of a contingent choice survey about management options at North Cascades National Park (NCNP). In our tournament-style survey, each respondent explicitly ranks several sets of scenarios and in addition several other rankings are implicit. Including the implicit rankings does not change our findings much, suggesting that the tournament-style format can add usefully to the data collected by a survey. We find strong evidence of nonuse values for both cultural and natural resource protection; indeed, nonuse values seem to dominate preferences even for those who have visited NCNP. We further find that respondents in general seem to value the protection of natural resources more than the protection of cultural resources, though both are valuable. |
| Keywords: | contingent choice, tournament, cultural protection, wilderness protection, national park, nonuse values |
| JEL: | C9 Q3 Q5 |
| Date: | 2014–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cgt:wpaper:2014-01&r=cul |
| By: | Daron Acemoglu (Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Ufuk Akcigit (Department of Economic, University of Pennsylvania); Murat Alp Celik (Department of Economic, University of Pennsylvania) |
| Abstract: | This paper argues that openness to new, unconventional and disruptive ideas has a .first-order impact on creative innovations - innovations that break new ground in terms of knowledge creation. After presenting a motivating model focusing on the choice between incremental and radical innovation, and on how managers of different ages and human capital are sorted across different types of .firms, we provide cross-country, firm-level and patent-level evidence consistent with this pattern. Our measures of creative innovations proxy for innovation quality (average number of citations per patent) and creativity (fraction of superstar innovators, the likelihood of a very high number of citations, and generality of patents). Our main proxy for openness to disruption is manager age. This variable is based on the idea that only companies or societies open to such disruption will allow the young to rise up within the hierarchy. Using this proxy at the country, .firm or patent level, we present robust evidence that openness to disruption is associated with more creative innovations. |
| Keywords: | corporate culture, creative destruction, creativity, economic growth, entrepreneurship, individualism, innovation, openness to disruption |
| JEL: | O40 O43 O33 P10 P16 Z1 |
| Date: | 2014–02–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pen:papers:14-004&r=cul |