Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes

As interest in measuring and understanding the impact of arts investments in community development continues to grow, this new study, Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes, commissioned by the Levitt Foundation and led by Slover Linett Audience Research, examines how "creative placemaking" interventions build social capital in communities, using permanent outdoor Levitt music venues as case studies. This research offers insights into arts-based strategies to promote social connectivity, a central goal of many creative placemaking efforts, and is a working illustration of what can and can't be learned from different impact measurement approaches

Who Goes Freelance? The Determinants of Self-Employment for Artists

This study examines the self-employment behavior of artists. Using data from the Current Population Survey between 2003 and 2015, we estimate a series of logit models to predict transitions from paid employment to self-employment in the arts. The results show that artists disproportionately freelance and frequently switch in and out of self-employment compared to all other professional workers. We also find that artists exhibit unique entrepreneurial profiles, particularly in terms of their demographic and employment characteristics. In particular, artist workers are considerably more likely to attain self-employment status when living in a city with a high saturation of artist occupations

Creative industries in the United States: programme and policy evaluation in cultural affairs

In policy fields such as public health, policing, and pollution abatement, evaluation of the effectiveness of programs and policies is commonplace: What are the goals sought? What means have been tried to achieve them? Which alternatives prove to be most cost effective in pursuit of goals? But evaluation of programs in the cultural and creative industries is presently much less extensive than in these other areas of policy. In part this might be the result of long-standing lack of clarity on the goals of cultural policy; it is still not entirely clear that arts councils, or Cabinet offices dedicated to digital culture and media, “know what they are doing” in this respect

More than STEM: spillovers from higher education institution infrastructure investments in the arts

Higher education institutions (HEIs) represent an enormous density of investment and resources, concentrating infrastructure spending and creating high human capital citizens and knowledge spillovers increasingly seen as critical to advancing regional quality of life. While HEIs’ prominent role in promoting regional economic growth, innovation, and attractiveness receives considerable research attention, most of that attention is paid to aspects of HEIs that are directly related to STEM activity. There are various theories that suggest spillovers from non-STEM activity at HEIs as well, specifically in the arts. This study examines whether spillovers occur for HEIs’ large capital investments in the arts. Specifically, we focus on HEI investments in arts physical infrastructure and whether these investments have any effects on regional-level business activity, including jobs and firms. To analyze HEI spillovers of physical arts infrastructure on regional jobs and firms, we use construction starts data on building projects from Dodge Analytics, Inc. and data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which include administrative data for every college, university, and technical/vocational institution that participates in the federal student financial aid programs. We couple these data with public data on regional-level socioeconomic indicators from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Zip-code Business Patterns data. We employ a quasi-experimental propensity-score matching design in order to control for a host of HEI and regional-level characteristics in examining the impact of infrastructure investments. The results suggest strong and consistent spillover effects (i.e. overall and specifically in the arts industry) for regions with HEIs that make these investments

Set in Stone: Building America's New Generation of Arts Facilities, 1994-2008

This study looks at a major building boom of museums, performing arts centers and theaters in the United States from 1994 to 2008. It is the first scientifically prepared study of its kind and was requested both by cultural leaders and major foundations that had, in many cases, provided support for these building projects. The primary goal of the study was to establish research that would serve as a basic and essential resource for any cultural group in the country involved in planning the construction, renovation, or expansion of their facilities