Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Hysteresis in cultural supply

Some cities permeate culture more than others. I have been struck how classical music is present in Vienna, where street musicians have symphonic orchestra quality. In this particular case, this may come from the city's history in classical composers, generating local interest in this type of culture. It may also be a market response to the tourists visiting Vienna thanks to this history.

Karol Jan Borowiecki looks at local preferences for classical music (as measured by the supply of cultural versus non-cultural goods) in Italy and finds that a substantial amount of cross-province variation can be explained by the birthplaces of Renaissance composers. This is a remarkable amount of persistence. Whether this reflects preferences of locals or tourists remains open, though.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Estimating the impact of tourists' preferences might be beyond scope, but the author seems to find that the results are robust to the level of tourism flows. See excerpt from page 16:

"(...) I measure tourism flows by accounting for the number of visitors to a province, Italians or foreigners, who stayed at least one night in a tourist accommodation in the year 2007. (...) The coefficients of main interest remain very stable and imply that our findings are not driven by tourism flows."