This article proposes a novel interdisciplinary approach to the economic history of art. Engaging with research questions defined by the existing art-historical literature, it draws on econometric approaches to understand better and measure how social and economic change affected artistic output-particularly output of rural imageryin nineteenth-century France. To facilitate this quantitative approach, the article introduces a novel data source that provides information about more than 140,000 works of art displayed in Paris during the nineteenth century. Analysis of this dataset demonstrates that artists' ability to have regular access to the countryside, largely because of artists' colonies and inexpensive train travel from Paris, had the greatest demonstrable effect on the output of landscape and rural genre painting in France during the nineteenth century.Behind the three gleaners one sees, vaguely silhouetted on the leaded horizon, the pikes of the popular riots and scaffolding of [17]93. 1
For many products, increases in cumulative production are associated with decreasing unit costs. However, a serious problem of reverse causality (lower prices leading to increasing demand) makes it difficult to use this relationship for policy. We study World War II, during which the demand for military products was largely exogenous, and the correlation between production, cumulative production and an exogenous time trend was limited. Our results indicate that decreases in cost can be attributed roughly equally to the growth of experience and to an exogenous time trend.
U.S. military production during World War II increased at an impressive rate and led to large declines in unit costs. However, the literature has focused on elucidating detailed mechanisms behind this relationship, using small datasets on specific products. Here we take a step back and, looking at an unprecedently large collection of data, we show that both exogenous technological progress and endogenous effects from increasing production experience were important, in roughly similar proportions. The demand for military products was largely exogenous, and the correlation between production, cumulative production, and time was weak, limiting issues of reverse causality and multicollinearity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.