Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Agglomeration economies in classical music

2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Italiano

10.1111/pirs.12078

1435-5957

Karol Jan Borowiecki,

Housing Market and Economics

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. Este estudio investiga los efectos de aglomeración en la producción de música clásica en un amplio abanico de ciudades para una muestra mundial de compositores nacidos entre 1750 y 1899. La teoría sugiere un equilibrio entre las economías de aglomeración (efectos de pares) y las deseconomías (hacinamiento de pares). Para probar esta hipótesis he usado datos históricos sobre compositores y empleado una variable instrumental única – una medida de la centralidad del nacimiento, calculada como la distancia media entre el lugar de nacimiento de un compositor y el lugar de nacimiento del resto de compositores. He encontrado un impacto causal fuerte del tamaño del grupo de pares en la cantidad de composiciones importantes escritas en un año determinado. De acuerdo con la teoría, el aumento de la productividad disminuye con el tiempo y se caracteriza por una relación en forma de U invertida. Estos resultados son robustos respecto a una gran lista de pruebas, como los controles de calidad de pares, las características de la ciudad, diversas medidas de productividad de los compositores, y diferentes estimaciones en las que también se utilizan como variables instrumentales de diferentes medidas de centralidad del nacimiento que varían en el tiempo. Appendix S1. Tentative overview of opera houses and concert halls in cities. Appendix S2. Parental influence on composer's birthplace. Appendix S3. The effect of peer quality. Appendix S4. Work heterogeneity. Appendix S5. Large city effects. Fig. S1. Centrality of birthplace and peer group size. Fig. S2. Productivity gains and total points on Murray's index score. Fig. S3. Effect of civil war on peer quality. Fig. S4. Peer group size effect on composer's output after peer quality effects are filtered out. Table S1. Poisson regressions. Table S2. Parental influence on composer's birthplace. Table S3. Instrumental variables (Peer group size and quality effects). Table S4. Reduced form model. Table S5. First-stage estimates for models accounting for peer quality. Table S6. Instrumental variables (With composer fixed effects). Table S7. Instrumental variables (Additional robustness tests). Table S8. Instrumental variables (Alternative productivity measures). Table S9. Instrumental variables (Large city effects). Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.