25 research outputs found
Hot Streaks in Artistic, Cultural, and Scientific Careers
The hot streak, loosely defined as winning begets more winnings, highlights a
specific period during which an individual's performance is substantially
higher than her typical performance. While widely debated in sports, gambling,
and financial markets over the past several decades, little is known if hot
streaks apply to individual careers. Here, building on rich literature on
lifecycle of creativity, we collected large-scale career histories of
individual artists, movie directors and scientists, tracing the artworks,
movies, and scientific publications they produced. We find that, across all
three domains, hit works within a career show a high degree of temporal
regularity, each career being characterized by bursts of high-impact works
occurring in sequence. We demonstrate that these observations can be explained
by a simple hot-streak model we developed, allowing us to probe quantitatively
the hot streak phenomenon governing individual careers, which we find to be
remarkably universal across diverse domains we analyzed: The hot streaks are
ubiquitous yet unique across different careers. While the vast majority of
individuals have at least one hot streak, hot streaks are most likely to occur
only once. The hot streak emerges randomly within an individual's sequence of
works, is temporally localized, and is unassociated with any detectable change
in productivity. We show that, since works produced during hot streaks garner
significantly more impact, the uncovered hot streaks fundamentally drives the
collective impact of an individual, ignoring which leads us to systematically
over- or under-estimate the future impact of a career. These results not only
deepen our quantitative understanding of patterns governing individual
ingenuity and success, they may also have implications for decisions and
policies involving predicting and nurturing individuals with lasting impact
Institutions, Human Capital, and Development
In this article, we revisit the relationship among institutions, human capital, and development. We argue that empirical models that treat institutions and human capital as exogenous are misspecified, both because of the usual omitted variable bias problems and because of differential measurement error in these variables, and that this misspecification is at the root of the very large returns of human capital, about four to five times greater than that implied by micro (Mincerian) estimates, found in the previous literature. Using cross-country and cross-regional regressions, we show that when we focus on historically determined differences in human capital and control for the effect of institutions, the impact of institutions on long-run development is robust, whereas the estimates of the effect of human capital are much diminished and become consistent with micro estimates. Using historical and cross-country regression evidence, we also show that there is no support for the view that differences in the human capital endowments of early European colonists have been a major factor in the subsequent institutional development of former colonies.Comisión Nacional de Investigación Ciencia y Tecnología (Chile) (CONICYT/Programa de Investigación Asociativa (project SOC1102))United States. Army Research Office (ARO MURI W911NF-12-1-0509
Colonial America
The first permanent British settlement in what became the United States was established in 1607, nearly 170 years prior to the American declaration of independence. This chapter examines the economic development of the British North American colonies that became the United States. As it describes, abundant natural resources and scarce labor and capital contributed to the remarkable growth in the size of the colonial economy, and allowed the free white colonial population to enjoy a relatively high standard of living. There was not, however, much improvement over time in living standards. Patterns of factor abundance also played an important role in shaping colonial institutions, encouraging reliance on indentured and enslaved labor as well as the development of representative government. For most of the colonial era, the colonists happily accepted their relationship to Britain. After 1763, however, changes in British policies following the end of the Seven Years War created growing tensions with the colonists and ultimately led to the colonies to declare their independence
Quantifying and predicting success in show business
Recent studies in the science of success have shown that the highest-impact
works of scientists or artists happen randomly and uniformly over the
individual's career. Yet in certain artistic endeavours, such as acting in
films and TV, having a job is perhaps the most important achievement: success
is simply making a living. By analysing a large online database of information
related to films and television we are able to study the success of those
working in the entertainment industry. We first support our initial claim,
finding that two in three actors are "one-hit wonders". In addition we find
that, in agreement with previous works, activity is clustered in hot streaks,
and the percentage of careers where individuals are active is unpredictable.
However, we also discover that productivity in show business has a range of
distinctive features, which are predictable. We unveil the presence of a
rich-get-richer mechanism underlying the assignment of jobs, with a Zipf law
emerging for total productivity. We find that productivity tends to be highest
at the beginning of a career and that the location of the "annus mirabilis" --
the most productive year of an actor -- can indeed be predicted. Based on these
stylized signatures we then develop a machine learning method which predicts,
with up to 85% accuracy, whether the annus mirabilis of an actor has yet passed
or if better days are still to come. Finally, our analysis is performed on both
actors and actresses separately, and we reveal measurable and statistically
significant differences between these two groups across different metrics,
thereby providing compelling evidence of gender bias in show business.Comment: 6 Figure