On the construction of property rights in aesthetic ideas

The paper attempts to formulate concrete proposals for a change in laws of intellectual property, based on a communication-oriented theoretical analysis of the issue. The particular role of collection societies is investigated. The proposals arrived at suggest a strengthening of non-negotiable, non-hereditary authors' rights, and a refinancing fee collected for copies of works of art with classical status and distributed to members of currently active art circles.     

Is increased public spending for the preservation of historic monuments inevitable? The French case

There is a permanent expansion of the number of sites or properties listed as historic monuments in France. This expansion and the lack of productivity gains in the sector of restoration lead, within a stable economy, to an ever greater proportion of the national income being earmarked for upkeep and restoration. Hence the number of monuments to be subsidized grows. The policy does not include any mechanism of regulation. Ironically, laws governing this area have the effect of precipitating cost increases. Three possible alternatives are considered: appeals for sponsorship, merchandising, delisting.     

The Determinants of Artistic Innovation: Bringing in the Role of Organizations

This article deals with the determinants of artistic innovation by arts organizations. First, we define artistic innovation. Second, we review the literature on its determinants, identifying some gaps. In particular, we observe that existing research mostly focuses on macro-environmental factors and tends to ignore the role of the organizations themselves. Thus, drawing from the organizational literature on innovation we formulate testable propositions that relate organizational factors to artistic innovation. We hope that our focus on organizational factors contributes to a more comprehensive framework on the determinants of artistic innovation in particular and programming in general.     

Programmatic Risk-Taking by American Opera Companies

This study explores the relationships between culture,politics, and the decision-making process of theAmerican opera company. It combines socio-economicdata with the financial and program data of key operacompanies to explore important influences inprogramming decisions. It tests the hypothesizedrelationships between risk-taking by opera companiesand socio-economic variables such as wealth,government funding, and donor involvement. This studyfinds that local government funding encourages programconventionality, while federal support such as the NEAencourages program risk-taking. Socio-economicvariables such as conservatism, wealth, and educationlevel were also found to affect opera programming.     

The economics of music festivals

This paper attempts to explain the rapid growth in the number of classical music and opera festivals. Two secularly increasing demand factors — a rise in real disposable incomes and an increased amount of time and money devoted to holidays — are well met by the supply of music festivals which almost perfectly combine culture and holidays. On the supply side, festivals may profit from low marginal cost of production factors and are considered as an effort to avoid restrictions from government regulations and trade unions.     

Corporate Support for Artistic and Cultural Activities: What Determines the Distribution of Corporate Giving?

This paper examines the allocation of corporate donations among variouscategories of recipients and the reasons underlying that allocation. Ananalytical model is utilized to determine the importance of profitability,firm size, advertising expenditures and type of business in determining thelevel of support for each activity. The results demonstrate that corporategiving to artistic/cultural activities is correlated with advertisingexpenditures, while donations to educational, civic and health causes are not.Thus, support for culture and the arts is a means of directly promoting thefirm, while giving to other causes fulfills the firm's goals throughalternative means.     

Arts policy research for the next 25 years: a trajectory after <Emphasis Type="Italic">Patrons Despite Themselves</Emphasis>

This article was presented at the symposium dedicated to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts Policy (Feld et al., 1983), held by the Association for Cultural Economics International, Boston, June 2008. It considers “big questions” in arts policy that promise intellectual and social payoff if approached in the spirit that animated the effort behind Patrons Despite Themselves, with special attention to issues that economists might illuminate, namely: (1) Waste of resources; (2) A workable business model for digital media; (3) Increasing the value created through amateur participation; (4) Withdrawal of elites, especially economic elites, from their historic participation in arts governance and support; and (5) Fragmentation of collective patrimony. The associated questions are the same in each case: Why is this happening? Is there a market failure or equity justification for government action? What policies would help?     

State Subsidies and Repertoire Conventionality in the Non-Profit English Theatre Sector: An Econometric Analysis

This paper examines the impact of financial and socio-economic factors on repertoire decisions of the grant-aided, non-profit theatre sector in England using cross-sectional regression analysis for the seasons 1996/97 to 1998/99. The dependent variable, a conventionality index, a variant of the DiMaggio/Stenberg conformity index, is calculated first. This shows a very considerable variation in repertoire conventionality, so measured, in the non-profit English theatre sector. A model is then constructed to assess the impact of the above-mentioned factors in determining variations in this index using a dataset hitherto not analysed in this way. The empirical results show that public subsidy, the size and the location of a theatre as well as the local average income have an impact on conventionality, which confirms existing empirical findings.     

Revisiting tax subsidies for cultural institutions

This paper was presented at the symposium dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the publication of Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts Policy (Feld et al. 1983), held by the Association for Cultural Economics International, Boston, June 2008. Patrons Despite Themselves raised and tried to answer a number of important questions of policy concerning indirect government support for the arts. These questions have continued salience for what we see in our museums and hear in our concert halls. The primary source of federal indirect aid in the U.S. continues to derive from the deduction in the federal income tax for contributions to not-for-profit cultural institutions. On the other hand, there has been a series of recent challenges to the tax-exempt status of charitable institutions.

Who pays? Who benefits? Who decides?

This paper was presented at the symposium dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the publication of Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts Policy (Feld et al. 1983), held by the Association for Cultural Economics International, Boston, June 2008. It considers alternative means of providing indirect tax-based state support of the arts, such as the use of tax credits as opposed to tax deductions for charitable contributions, matching grants, and support applied to specific projects. It also considers the problem of broad-based changes to tax policy that have unintended consequences for arts organizations.      

The Governance of University Knowledge Transfer: A Critical Review of the Literature

Universities have long been involved in knowledge transfer activities. Yet the last 30 years have seen major changes in the governance of university–industry interactions. Knowledge transfer has become a strategic issue: as a source of funding for university research and (rightly or wrongly) as a policy tool for economic development. Universities vary enormously in the extent to which they promote and succeed in commercializing academic research. The identification of clear-cut models of governance for university–industry interactions and knowledge transfer processes is not straightforward. The purpose of this article is to critically discuss university knowledge transfer models and review the recent developments in the literature on research collaborations, intellectual property rights and spin-offs, those forms of knowledge transfer that are more formalized and have been institutionalized in recent years. The article also addresses the role played by university knowledge transfer organizations in promoting commercialization of research results.

Valuing the Arts: A Contingent Valuation Approach

Government funding of the arts has received considerable attention in the United States in recent years. Efforts to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts and declining budgets for state arts agencies have raised questions about how much individuals value the arts. This paper applies the contingent valuation method to assess this value, using surveys of random households and of arts patrons. Our analysis estimated a mean willingness to pay (WTP) among all Kentucky households from $6 to$27, depending on the estimation technique used and on whether the scenario discussed is to increase arts performances by 25 per cent, or to avoid a 25per cent or 50 per cent decrease in the number of performances. Among arts patron households, the mean WTP ranges from $61 to $132.Consumer demand for arts performances in large part follows a predictable pattern. The likelihood of respondents agreeing to make the donation that is requested rises as the size of the donation decreases. The likelihood is higher to avoid a 50 per cent decline in performances than to avoid a 25 percent decline in performances. The mean WTP rises with income, and arts patron households have a much higher WTP than all households. WTP rises with on-site use factors such as frequency of attendance. The WTP also rises for arts patrons households with off-site use such as watching arts events on television or reading about the arts in newspapers and magazines.     

How effective are international copyright conventions in the music industry?

The paper is concerned with the issue of whether international copyright legislation is effective in curbing audio software counterfeiting. The paper finds that copyright conventions have not been effective in reducing audio counterfeiting to comparatively low levels. This result holds even when allowances are made for the duration of copyright convention membership and the specificity of the articles of the convention. Economic development is found to be the main determinant of low counterfeit levels. This would tend to support anecdotal evidence which indicates that economic development is a necessary condition for the active recognition of audio property rights by the general public, judiciary and police. It is also consistent with a view that pirate audio software, being an inferior good, has a more buoyant market in less developed economies. From a policy perspective the research would seem to suggest that the extensive efforts and copious attention to detail by legal experts has made little impact on counterfeit activity and is secondary in importance to the socio-economic environment in which these laws are being applied.     

Can public arts education replace arts subsidization?

The debate about whether the arts should be supported or not is far from new, and most governments support the arts in one way or the other. The literature considers several arguments in favor of such interventions. Public education may seem to be an action which could, in the long run, lead to possible reductions of subsidies. Surveys show that those who have been exposed to the arts when young participate more when adult. However, the “non-market” transmission from parents to children generates an external effect, which has to be taken into account to reach first-best situations. We construct an overlapping generations model in which young consumers are exposed to both public education toward the arts and to non-altruistic transmission of such a taste from their parents. We show that the first-best can be reached only if there is both public cultural education and subsidization of arts consumption. Therefore, education cannot be considered as a substitute for subsidies to arts consumption. However, as is often the case in European countries, government intervention is usually below the first-best level. Using a model calibrated on French data, we show that it is then preferable to subsidize education, while consumption, especially of the older generations, should be taxed rather than subsidized.

The impact of cultural economics on economic theory

The paper asks what kind of impact cultural economics has had on the development of economic theory. Six research areas are discussed: productivity differentials between artistic and non-artistic labor, variations of the public good concept, particularly in relation to environmental goods, endogenous changes in preferences, long-term rates of return on paintings, impact of new media technologies and the autonomy of artistic valuation.It is shown that these topics have relevance beyond their applications in the cultural field, and that the theoretical issues involved challenge standard assumptions and standard modelling procedures in economic theory.Presidential address delivered at the 9th international conference of the Association for Cultural Economics, held in Boston, May 8–11, 1996.     

Public Funding of Controversial Art

In 1990, the Act governing theUnited States' National Endowment for the Arts wasamended requiring the Chairperson to ensure thatjudges of grant applications should take intoconsideration ``general standards of decency andrespect for the diverse beliefs and values of theAmerican public'. This provision has been widelydebated, and was challenged on the basis of whether itviolated the right of freedom of expression. But arecent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court found theprovision to be constitutional. This paper examinesrationales that have been put forward by philosophicalliberals, economists, and communitarians in support ofpublic funding of the arts. It finds that for each ofthese rationales the decency-and-respect provision onfunding is justifiable. The paper concludes with aspeculative discussion of the economics of the``artworld'.