Birth Location, Migration, and Clustering of Important Composers

Geographic clustering and productivity: An instrumental variable approach for classical composers

“…Borowiecki (2010) demonstrates that historical wars had a heterogeneous impact on classical composers' creative production. Depending on the type of war, military conflict might have had a positive or a negative effect.…”

“…This is the most demanding test as it analyzes to some extent the spatial distribution of composers' birth locations and not only the incidence to locate in the geographic cluster. It is reassuring that the family controls included or sub-sampling hardly affect the probability to locate in any 14 The size of the radius was used by O'Hagan and Borowiecki (2010). In only three cases the locations had to be readjusted.…”

“…3 I also focus, for several reasons, on only one specific group of individuals -on classical composers. First, as argued by O'Hagan and Borowiecki (2010), composers were highly mobile individuals with a marked need to cluster in order to exploit economies of scale. Composers needed either a symphony orchestra or opera company and the complementary infrastructure, such as concert hall or opera house, in order to perform and test their compositions.…”

In fatal pursuit of immortal fame: Peer competition and early mortality of music composers

“…Previous sources have been argued to be less reliable. For example, a sample of important composers by Gilder and Port (1978) is heavily biased towards English-speaking countries (O'Hagan and Borowiecki, 2010). Risks of country or marketing biases in the selection of composers in Murray (2003) are arguably reduced.…”

“…The high frequency of individual contact within cities fosters the spillover of technological advancements, knowledge and news, leading to higher productivity and thus wages (Glaeser et al, 1992;Black and Henderson, 1999;Mori and Turrini, 2005). The benefits of agglomeration are especially important to artists, whose product can be made more accessible to a wider audience via the provision of an appropriate setting, such as galleries, operas, and symphony orchestras (O'Hagan and Borowiecki, 2010). Artists can further be inspired by the aesthetics of cities, which additionally offer an appropriate opportunity to interact, collaborate with, or even be inspired by the work of, colleagues.…”