The Creative Class, Bohemians and Local Labor Market Performance: A Micro-data Panel Study for Germany 1975-2004

The paper aims at testing Florida's concept of the Creative Class using panel data for 323 West German regions for the time period 1975 2004. Applying a dynamic system approach based on GMM, we find that the local concentration of the Creative Class has predictive power for the economic development of a region and tends to outperform traditional indicators of human capital. However, our results do not support Florida's assertion that the creative workers flock where the Bohemians are. According to our findings, the Creative Class is attracted by favorable economic conditions as indicated by employment growth or an increasing wage bill. --Culture,Regional Development,Bohemians,Creative Class,Dynamic Panel Methods

Value-Free Analysis of Values: A Culture-Based Development Approach

Recent literature in the fields of Political Economy, New Institutional Economics and New Cultural Economics has converged in the use of empirical methods, offering a series of consistent quantitative analysis of values. However, an overarching positive methodology for the value-free study of values has not yet precipitated. Building on a mixed systematic-integrative literature review of a pluralistic variety of perspectives from Adam Smith’s ‘Impartial’ Spectator to modern moral philosophy, the current study suggests the Culture-Based Development (CBD) approach for analyzing the economic impact of values on socio-economic development. The CBD approach suggests that the value-free analysis needs: (i) to use positive methods to classify a value as local or universal; (ii) to examine the existence of what is termed the Aristotelian Kuznets curve of values (i.e., to test for the presence of an inflection point in the economic impact from the particular value) and (iii) to account for Platonian cultural relativity (i.e., the cultural embeddedness expressed in the geographic nestedness of the empirical data about values). The paper details the theoretical and methodological cornerstones underpinning the proposed CBD approach for value-free analysis of values

Geographies of Flowers and Geographies of Flower Power

The world is changing under the pressure of environmental and health crises, and in this context, location choice and political choice become of even more poignant importance. Following a Culture-Based Development (CBD) stand, our paper highlights the link between political voting and the cultural and ecological valuation of a place. We start from the premise that the individual utility functions of the urban inhabitant and the urban voter coincide, since they both express the citizen’s satisfaction with the life in a place. We suggest that the unified citizen’s utility function is driven by a trade-off between the availability of virtual and physical spaces for interaction. We expect that this trade-off can lead to dissatisfaction with the place and consequent political discontent if the incumbents’ access to green areas and artistic environment in a place is simultaneously hampered for a long time. Our operational hypothesis is that the political sensitivity of citizens is related to the local availability of green areas (geographies of flowers) and cultural capital endowments (geographies of flower power). Using individual-level data from the WVS from the period close before the pandemic—2017–2020, we test empirically this hypothesis. We use as an outcome of interest the individual propensity to active political behaviour. We explain this propensity through the geographies of flowers (i.e., green areas) and geographies of flower power (i.e., cultural and creative industries). We compare the effects for urban and for rural areas. We find strong dependence of politically proactive behaviour on the geographies of flowers and geographies of flower power, with explicit prominence in urban areas. We find a more pronounced effect of these two geographies on the utility function of incumbent than migrant residents. We also crosscheck empirically the relationship of this CBD mechanism on an aggregate level, using data from the Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor. The findings confirm the Schelling magnifying effect of micro preferences on a macro level

The creative class, bohemians and local labor market performance : micro-data panel study for Germany 1975-2004

The paper aims at testing Florida's concept of the Creative Class using panel data for 323 West German regions for the time period 1975 - 2004. Applying a dynamic system approach based on GMM, we find that the local concentration of the Creative Class has predictive power for the economic development of a region and tends to outperform traditional indicators of human capital. However, our results do not support Florida's assertion that the creative workers flock where the Bohemians are. According to our findings, the Creative Class is attracted by favorable economic conditions as indicated by employment growth or an increasing wage bill

Entrepreneurial intention among high-school students: the importance of parents, peers and neighbors

Literature on the formation of intention toward entrepreneurship in adolescents has focused on either parental (vertical) transmission of social capital or network effects from peers or neighbours (horizontal). Considering the simultaneous effect of parents, peers, and neighbours, we suggest that such three levels identify a mechanism whereby the individual perception of their importance interacts with their objective characteristics. With a unique dataset for second-year high-school adolescents in the Italian city of Palermo, and employing Logit and 3SLS methods, we find evidence for a strong parental effect and for secondary peer (peers) effects on student intention. We also detect clear endogenous effects from the neighbourhood and the overall context. Moreover, entrepreneurship is confirmed to be perceived, even by high-school students, as a buffer for possible unemployment and social mobility

Cultural corridors: An analysis of persistence in impacts on local development — A neo-Weberian perspective on South-East Europe

Culture matters for economic development. This postulate has been a main conceptual concern for “old” institutional economics (OIE) and has lately also been tested through neoclassically inspired econometric techniques. This conceptual foundation has been confirmed in several quantitative studies on developed countries, in particular cases from the USA, Germany, and Italy. In less developed regions with a wealth of cultural heritage, particularly in South-East Europe, this postulate is still an underexplored issue from the perspective of advanced econometric approaches. Our goal is to examine the impact of the so-called South-East European cultural corridors on welfare — and especially on total employment — at the local or regional level. Accounting for gross value added and sectoral specialization, we examine the effect of such corridors by considering the distance to a cultural corridor: namely, the East Trans-Balkan Road (crossing Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece) as an explanatory factor for regional development, particularly employment. Using the European University Institute (EUI) European Regional Dataset (ERD), as well as the geo-data from the Cultural Corridors of the South-East Europe website, we estimate a regression model using a 2SLS instrumental variable (IV) approach, with a pooled dataset at the NUTS 3 level (Eurostat) from 1980 to 2011. We then triangulate the results by using the distance to the cultural corridor concerned as a treatment effect in a propensity-score-matching and difference-in-differences exploratory analysis. The findings confirm the importance of distance to the cultural corridor under investigation as a strong predictor for local socio-economic development. The results further suggest that the slow evolution of culture over time is likely to lead to the gradual emergence of new geographical cultural centers and a new cultural path-dependence build-up of persistence chains