Does culture affect local productivity and urban amenities?

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.

Creative culture, risk‐taking, and corporate financial decisions

“…Therefore, LocalFedGrant is expected to be a strong and valid IV for creative culture, as proxied by CreativeShare . In a recent paper, Boualam () also uses the total amount of federal arts grants received by local artists and organizations in a similar creative culture factor. This variable also used in the recent literature comes out as a good candidate for a strong IV.…”

Sports‐led Tourism, Spatial Displacement, and Hotel Demand

“…Tourism represents an important source of revenue in countries around the world (Neumayer and Plümper 2016). Sports and entertainment events can affect many local economic outcomes, including crime (Montolio and Planells-Struse 2016), property values (Boualam 2014;Humphreys and Nowak 2017), rent (Carlino and Coulson 2004), and potentially local economic growth (Nitsch and Wendland 2017). Relatively little research exists analyzing the relationship between major league sports events in North America and urban sport-related tourism.…”

Professional Sports Events, Concerts, and Urban Place Based Policy: Evidence from the Staples Center

“…Sports and entertainment events can affect many urban outcomes, including crime (Montolio and Planells-Struse, 2016), property values (Humphreys and Nowak, 2017;Boualam, 2014), rent (Carlino and Coulson, 2004), and potentially local economic growth (Nitsch and Wendland, 2017).…”