Les Misérables? Labour Market Outcomes Among Artists in Europe

This paper documents the labour market position of artists across Europe and examines how it co-varies with public cultural spending. Using EU-LFS micro-data for 2009-2023, we compare artists to non-artists using harmonised measures of wage rank, employment, and non-standard work. Using within-country variation and controlling for demographic factors, artists rank substantially lower in the wage distribution: in the pooled sample, the estimated penalty is about 0.46 wage deciles relative to other salaried workers and about 0.28 deciles relative to other professionals. These earnings gaps coexist with higher exposure to non-standard employment, including part-time work, temporary contracts, and multiple job holding, with patterns that persist over the life cycle and appear in most countries. We then link individual outcomes to a country-year panel of real per capita public expenditure on cultural services. Higher cultural spending is associated with modest improvements in aggregate employment and lower part-time incidence, but these associations do not systematically differ for artists or arts graduates. The only consistent differential correlation is an increase in multiple job holding among arts graduates in higher-spending environments. Thus, changes in aggregate cultural spending are not sufficient on their own to narrow wage or job-quality gaps for artists, motivating a rethinking of cultural policy instruments toward mechanisms that more directly address labour market risks faced by cultural workers.