The Phantom of the Opera: Cultural Amenities, Human Capital, and Regional Economic Growth
By Oliver Falck, Michael Fritsch, Stephan Heblich. Social Science Research Network, 2011
159 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We analyze the extent to which endogenous cultural amenities affect the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. To overcome endogeneity, we draw on a quasi-natural experiment in German history and exploit the exogenous spatial distribution of baroque opera houses built as a part of rulers' competition for prestigious cultural amenities. Robustness tests confirm our strategy and strengthen the finding that proximity to a baroque opera house significantly affects the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. Then, a cross-region growth regression shows that these employees induce local knowledge spillovers and shift a location to a higher growth path.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a4d6660673a32363cdc66a214e8458cb211d0a7
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
- M. Obschonka
- Michael Stuetzer
- David B. Audretsch
- Michael Wyrwich
- Peter J. Rentfrow
- M. Satchell
- L. Shaw-Taylor
- Mike Coombes
Citations in the corpus
- What is Different About Urbanization in Rich and Poor Countries? Cities in Brazil, China, India and the United States (2017, unknown): “Falck et al. (2011) use the location of Baroque Opera Houses as an instrument for human capital in Germany, and find evidence for both static and dynamic effects of local skills.”
- Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs: A Review of Recent Literature (2018, unknown): “19 Prominent examples include Saxenian (1994), Kenney (2000), Audretsch and Feldman (2003), and Florida (2004), and recent empirical work includes Falck et al. (2011), Audretsch et al. (2012), Glaeser et al. (2015), Stuetzer et al. (2015), Obschonka et al. (2015), and Sorenson (2017).”
- Industry structure, entrepreneurship, and culture: An empirical analysis using historical coalfields (2016, methodology): “As a basic indicator for terrain difficulty we use the ruggedness of a region which is measured by the distance of the maximum and minimum elevation (Falck et al., 2011).”