Music in the air: estimating the social return to cultural amenities

If being around smart people makes us smarter and more productive, what can regions do to attract smart people? This paper considers endogenous cultural amenities as a location factor for high-skilled workers. To overcome selection in the provision of cultural amenities, we exploit variation in contemporaneous cultural amenities that is explained by the path-dependence of historical agglomerations of the cultural activities. To assess spillovers from high-skilled workers attracted by cultural amenities, we use a 1% sample drawn from the population of all West German workers under social security during the period 1975–2010. This panel of individual observations allows us to compare wages of similar individuals who work in locations with different levels of high-skilled workers who are attracted by cultural amenities. To account for non-random selection of workers among cities, we use individual-location fixed effects. Our results show that cultural amenities are an important factor in the location decision of high-skilled workers. The positive effect of the local share of high-skilled workers on unskilled, skilled and high-skilled wages indicates strong and productive spillovers.     

打印机捅出安全漏洞

管理员享用着管理更加方便的网络打印机,却不知道他们通过SNMP(简单网络管理协议),有可能打开了安全的缺口。     

Science in the 19th-century zoo

The 19th century saw the advent of the modern zoological garden. The newly founded zoos not only claimed to educate and entertain their audiences, but also to serve science by providing direct access to exotic animals. However, reality did not live up to the promise of such rhetoric. The vast majority of biologists preferred to use dead bodies as the material for their morphological research. Nevertheless, there was still a strong interaction between the zoo and science. In the debate on Darwinism, the apes in the cage played a vital role.