IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wus005/8642.html

Harmonious Relations: Quality transmission among composers in the very long run

Author

Listed:
  • Marchenko, Maria

  • Borowiecki, Karol Jan

  • Ford, Nicholas Martin

Abstract

Most creatives acquire professional talents by learning from others, but in most settings it is difficult to estimate the existence of long-term effects. This paper explores the transmission of skills over a period of more than seven centuries by focusing on the case of music composers. We ask the question: how does a composer’s quality influence the quality of the composers he or she teaches? Our analysis builds on a unique dataset of 17,433 composers from around the world since the fourteenth century. By comparing actual teacher–student pairs with plausible counterfactual pairs and by using a two-stage framework, we show a strong effect of quality transmission. Moreover, we find quality transmission persists across multiple generations: from teacher to student, and subsequently to student’s student and so on. Our results provide new insights on drivers of creativity over the very long term, as well as the influence of teachers on students' achievements.

Suggested Citation

  • Marchenko, Maria & Borowiecki, Karol Jan & Ford, Nicholas Martin, 2022. "Harmonious Relations: Quality transmission among composers in the very long run," Department of Economics Working Paper Series 321, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:wiw:wus005:8642
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://epub.wu.ac.at/8642/
    File Function: original version
    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. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Karol Jan Borowiecki & Martin Hørlyk Kristensen & Marc T. Law, 2025. "What’s in a Name? Dynasties, Selection, and Talent Allocation Among Classical Composers," ACEI Working Paper Series AWP-03-2025, Association for Cultural Economics International.
    3. Yuqing Song, 2024. "Valuing Collaboration in Art: Insights from Zhang Daqian's Network," Working Papers CEB 24-012, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    4. Borowiecki, Karol Jan & Kristensen, Martin Hørlyk & Law, Marc T., 2025. "Where are the female composers? Human capital and gender inequality in music history," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 171(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • N30 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • O31 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
    • 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:wiw:wus005:8642. 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: WU Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://research.wu.ac.at/ .

    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.