This study investigates agglomeration effects for classical music production in a wide range of cities for a global sample of composers born between 1750 and 1899. Theory suggests a trade-off between agglomeration economies (peer effects) and diseconomies (peer crowding). I test this hypothesis using historical data on composers and employ a unique instrumental variable -a measure of birth centrality, calculated as the average distance between a composer's birthplace and the birthplace of his peers. I find a strong causal impact of peer group size on the number of important compositions written in a given year. Consistent with theory, the productivity gain eventually decreases and is characterized by an inverted U-shaped relationship. These results are robust to a large series of tests, including checks for quality of peers, city characteristics, various measures of composers' productivity, and across different estimations in which also time-varying birth centrality measures are used as instrumental variables.JEL classification: D24, J24, N90, R12, Z11

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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 that admission to theatre-type activities increases as the number of domestic tourists goes up, whereas admission to museums or concerts rises with an increase in foreign tourists. Admissions to exhibitions and shows expose a positive association with both domestic and international tourists, while non-cultural activities remain statistically insignificant. The results provide empirical support for the existence of a strong relationship between tourism flows and cultural participation. The findings also imply that the demand for entertainment varies depending on the origin of the tourist.

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The importance of creativity is being increasingly recognized by economists; however, the possibility that emotional factors determine creative processes is largely ignored. Building on 1,400 letters written by three famous music composers, I obtain well-being indices that span their lifetimes. The validity of this methodology is shown by linking the indices with biographical information and through estimation of the determinants of well-being. I then exploit the data and provide quantitative evidence on the existence of a causal impact of negative emotions on outstanding creativity, an association hypothesized across several disciplines since the antiquity that has not yet been convincingly established.

Heritage institutions house cultural and research content, which is the key source to stimulate soft innovation. Despite the potential, heritage collections are mostly inaccessible via digital mediums. We analyse the macro, meso and micro conditions of heritage organizations across Europe to identify the key determinants that foster soft innovation as reflected by the share of collection digitization and online publication. We find that organizations respond positively to an environment of high consumer digital literacy and sustainable resource allocation that enables slack, skilled staff and long-term strategic planning. Innovation is thus, in fact, enhanced by digital literacy from both producers and consumers.

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. On the contrary, instead of being a substitute for more traditional forms of cultural consumption, the probability of game playing increases with the consumption of other cultural goods (e.g., listening to music or watching television) or active involvement in artistic activities (e.g., writing or visual arts production). Game playing is in general an urban phenomenon, and it is positively associated with the ownership of home equipment and access to new technologies but decreases with a person's greater time restrictions. The main differences to the traditional art formats is that game playing particularly appeals to younger, usually male, cohorts.

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