IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cue/wpaper/awp-02-2019.html

The Origins of Creativity: The Case of the Arts in the United States since 1850

Author

Listed:
  • Karol J. Borowiecki

    (Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark)

Abstract

This research illuminates the historical development of creative activity in the United States. Census data is used to identify creative occupations (i.e., artists, musicians, authors, actors) and data on prominent creatives, as listed in a comprehensive biographical compendium. The analysis rst sheds light on the socio-economic background of creative people and how it has changed since 1850. The results indicate that the proportion of female creatives is relatively high, time constraints can be a hindrance for taking up a creative occupation, racial inequality is present and tends to change only slowly, and education plays a signi cant role for taking up a creative occupation. Second, the study systematically documents and quanti es the geography of creative clusters in the United States and explains how these have evolved over time and across creative domains. Third, it investigates the importance of outstanding talent in a discipline for the local growth of an artistic cluster.

Suggested Citation

  • Karol J. Borowiecki, 2019. "The Origins of Creativity: The Case of the Arts in the United States since 1850," ACEI Working Paper Series AWP-02-2019, Association for Cultural Economics International, revised Mar 2019.
  • Handle: RePEc:cue:wpaper:awp-02-2019
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://files.culturaleconomics.org/papers/AWP-02-2019.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Winichakul, K. Pun & Zhang, Ning, 2024. "Enter stage left: Immigration and the American arts," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 225(C), pages 329-347.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • R1 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics
    • N33 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • Z11 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economics of the Arts and Literature

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cue:wpaper:awp-02-2019. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Paul Crosby (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aceiiea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.