Where Art Thou? Regional Distribution of Culture Workers in Finland

Abstract

This study seeks to shed light on the regional distribution of culture workers in Finland. What factors – if any - make the location decisions of culture workers different from that of others? This study uses a rich micro level data for an application of multinomial logit model. The data is from the Finnish Longitudinal Census File and it contains information e.g. on individual's personal charactersitics, family characteristics and working life characteristics. The estimation results show that being a culture worker is an important factor in locational choice: the coefficient of living in a metropolitan area compared to rural areas is highly positive. According to the estimated marginal effects, the likelihood of living in a metropolitan region increases as much as 22 percentage points if the person is a culture worker. Another interesting notion is that the residential choices of cultural entrepreneurs seem to differ from that of other entrepreneurs.