Economics: Research Guide

"Objective - Heritage sites are typical informal learning spaces that play significant roles in promoting cultural and historical knowledge among visitors. Visitors' engagement with heritage sites is a traditional view of exploring the informal learning spaces in the cultural sector. Methodology/Technique - Informal learning within heritage sites, however, has been informed and changed by digitization and virtualization in the cultural sector. But this generates new research interests in establishing links between traditional and digital cultural studies using a case study methodology. Finding - This paper discussed several cases to show how digital technologies inform visitors' engagement w..

Individualist societies are more innovative, but little is known about the underlying individual behaviors. I use international labor-market and patent data to show that individualism—the cultural dimension that emphasizes individual achievements over collective action—positively affects individual innovation. Comparing migrants from different cultural origins within the same destination country and using variation in individualism at the country, region, and person level, I find that more individualist migrants select into more innovative occupations—including research, creative jobs, and ambitious entrepreneurship. Individualists also engage more readily in knowledge diffusion on the..

We employ a sample of nearly 40, 000 gender-targeted online job vacancies in Vietnam from February 2019 to July 2020 to investigate gender differences in returns to physical attractiveness. In particular, we compare the monthly offered wage in matched vacancies with and without beauty preferences of the same characteristics among job ads directed at men and women separately. We find evidence that better-looking women enjoy a wage premium of 3.7 percentage points, whereas better-looking men do not. Further analysis shows that the gender differences in returns to beauty are mainly driven by gender role attitudes and the perceived lack of fit rather than productivity-enhancing effect or employe..

In December 2022, Cristiano Ronaldo, five-time Ballon d'Or winner and the most-followed person on Instagram, signed a reported 200million euros contract to play football in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for two and a half years. This marked one of several recent ground-shaking and expensive interventions by the KSA in global sports markets. We exploit the timing of this event, mid-way through a season of the Saudi Pro League, to estimate superstar effects. There are clear patterns showing that Ronaldo alone increased stadium attendance demand in the KSA, even before the influx of further stars in the summer of 2023. On average, Ronaldo helped to fill an additional 20% of the seats in his..

The recent spectacularized development in the Gulf cities of the Middle East and North Africa has brought into view its contradictory logic of urban change. The cities in that region are highly entrepreneurial, ambitious, and futuristic (Kanna, 2011), yet this happens in and through the long-standing tradition of monarchical power (Molotch and Ponzini, 2019). Royal authority is expressed in modern and globalized forms. Is this the case in other contexts where urban change proceeds in the context of royal influence? This paper addresses this question by looking at the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Although Indonesia is a democracy, in Yogyakarta, the royal family retains a strong presence in..

This research examines the phenomenon of pilgrimage tourism through a case study of the Fort Pilar Shrine in Zamboanga City, Philippines. By employing a mixed-methods approach, the study aims to investigate the factors contributing to the popularity of the shrine as a pilgrimage destination and analyze the socio-economic impacts it generates. The findings indicate that religious motivations, historical significance, and cultural experiences emerge as the key drivers attracting pilgrims to Fort Pilar Shrine. Furthermore, the shrine's economic significance is evident, as it contributes to job creation, income generation, and local business development. The study underscores the importance of s..

We provide quantitative evidence from museum collections about how copyright status affects the availability of digital images of artworks. The paper applies a regression discontinuity and differences-in-differences design to estimate online availability of artworks from U.S. collections on digital platforms. We find a strong increase in the availability of digital surrogates when copyright is perceived to expire and original artworks are likely to transition to the public domain. Moreover, artworks and surrogates made available see a large number of downstream reuses based on google image search data, which indicates online availability is of commercial and public value independent of right..

We seek to gain more insight into the effect of the crowds on the Home Advantage by analyzing the particular case of Argentinean football (also known as soccer), where for more than ten years, the visiting team fans were not allowed to attend the games. Additionally, during the COVID-19 lockdown, a significant number of games were played without both away and home team fans. The analysis of more than 20 years of matches of the Argentinean tournament indicates that the absence of the away team crowds was beneficial for the Top 5 teams during the first two years after their attendance was forbidden. An additional intriguing finding is that the lack of both crowds affects significantly all the ..

Existing full text datasets of U.S. public domain newspapers do not recognize the often complex layouts of newspaper scans, and as a result the digitized content scrambles texts from articles, headlines, captions, advertisements, and other layout regions. OCR quality can also be low. This study develops a novel, deep learning pipeline for extracting full article texts from newspaper images and applies it to the nearly 20 million scans in Library of Congress's public domain Chronicling America collection. The pipeline includes layout detection, legibility classification, custom OCR, and association of article texts spanning multiple bounding boxes. To achieve high scalability, it is built wit..

As CryptoPunks pioneers the innovation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in AI and art, the valuation mechanics of NFTs has become a trending topic. Earlier research identifies the impact of ethics and society on the price prediction of CryptoPunks. Since the booming year of the NFT market in 2021, the discussion of CryptoPunks has propagated on social media. Still, existing literature hasn't considered the social sentiment factors after the historical turning point on NFT valuation. In this paper, we study how sentiments in social media, together with gender and skin tone, contribute to NFT valuations by an empirical analysis of social media, blockchain, and crypto exchange data. We evidence so..

This OECD Guide takes stock of the current advice, guidelines, and good practices for assessing the impact of global events. Global events (including culture, sports and business events) can have a significant impact on local development. Yet measuring this impact in a consistent, reliable and comprehensive way can be challenging. This Guide provides an overview of approaches to impact assessment, discusses the issues, challenges and considerations to be made in conducting impact evaluations, and offers a set of actions which event hosts can take to improve impact assessments. In doing so, the Guide supports the OECD Recommendation on Global Events and Local Development, which helps countrie..

This OECD Guide sets out a framework of indicators to measure the impact of global events on local development. Global events (including culture, sports and business events) can have a significant impact on local development. Yet measuring this impact in a consistent, reliable, and comprehensive way can be challenging. This Guide presents a set of indicators which events hosts can incorporate into their evaluation strategy to assess the economic, social, and environmental impact of their event. It offers practical guidance and advice on how to implement this framework, alongside examples of indicator use. In doing so, the Guide supports the OECD Recommendation on Global Events and Local Deve..

Los museos son importantes generadores de cultura que contribuyen a la oferta turística local, lo cual puede tener implicaciones significativas en las economías locales. Estos espacios e instituciones tienen a sufrir problemas financieros en los países en desarrollo debido a la poca importancia que se les asigna desde los sectores público y privado. Se olvidan los beneficios que trae para la economía local y regional la inversión en museos, pues estos pueden atraer nuevas inversiones por parte de quienes buscan lugares con amenidades para sus ejecutivos en un mundo globalizado. También pueden contribuir a crear una oferta turística que atrae viajeros con mayor poder de compra, lo que..

This paper provides evidence of a consistent gap in the value of cultural goods exported from Italy and the value declared by its trading partners in official trade statistics for the period 1994-2021 and discusses it in the context of the literature on illicit trafficking in cultural property, a phenomenon that plights a number of both developing and developed countries rich in cultural heritage. Differences between the four categories of cultural goods recorded (archaeological goods, antiquities, paintings, and sculptures) are exploited to highlight potential areas where trafficking might be expected to be larger. We construct a panel dataset to estimate a gravity model of the gap includin..

We study the problem of sharing the revenue obtained by selling museum passes from the axiomatic perspective. In this setting, we propose replacing the usual dummy axiom with a milder requirement: order preservation with dummies. This new axiom formalizes the philosophical idea that even null agents/museums may have the right to receive a minimum allocation in a sharing situation. By replacing dummy with order preservation with dummies, we characterize several families of rules, which are convex combinations of the uniform and Shapley approaches. Our findings generalize several existing results in the literature. Also, we consider a domain of problems that is richer than the domain proposed ..

Using a new comprehensive survey of adults in large U.S. media markets we show that minority and low-skill individuals, who are heavily exposed to shocks to the local economy, typically have stronger preferences for and stronger ex- posure to local news than high-skill and white individuals. At the same time, these disadvantaged individuals have been negatively affected by the impact of the digital revolution on news provision. In particular, high-skill and white indi- viduals have more rapidly embraced online and social media while low-skill and minority individuals still heavily rely on local television and other traditional news providers. These differences in provider choices are importa..

This article analyzes the share of attention that the French allocate to different media groups, based on Prat [2018]. Based on a survey of 6, 000 individuals, we show that the media market is concentrated. The top four groups concentrate 47% of French people's attention. The public group (Radio France and France Télévision) is by far the most concentrated (19.8%), except among the youngest, for whom Meta has the strongest media power. We also show that the planned merger between the TF1 and M6 groups would have increased the level of concentration on the market without calling into question the leading position of either the public group or Meta. This work highlights a new tool for measur..

This study aims to measure the impact of the brand portfolio on the market value of company shares in the case of The Walt Disney Company during the period (1991-2020) using the multiple linear regression model (OLS). the results of the study showed that there is a negative significant relationship between Walt Disney's Stock Price and Studio Entertainment, a positive statistically significant with park and reports and Disney Consumer Products.

We seek to understand the effects of art therapy, practiced with palliative care patients in oncology, on the quality of worklife of caregivers. We study it from the perspective of the clinic of activity, i.e. the quali- ty of work by studying how art therapy contributes to the organization of the dialogue on the quality of work and to the development of caregivers' pouvoir d'agir (power to act) in a constrained hospital context. We carry an inquiry in a palliative cancer care center, with three modes of data collection (interviews, focus group, and observations). Art therapy forms part of a care system by participa- ting in the transformation of the work environment, of the caregivers-patie..

In the USA, the remuneration for songwriters whose copyrighted material is broadcast using online interactive music services is subject to a compulsory license with a rate that is regulated by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB). On the other hand, an essentially equally necessary input to the interactive music services, namely the sound recording copyright, is fully and freely negotiated between the parties. This situation sets up an interesting bargaining problem that should be of great interest to the CRB for their statutory mandate. The present paper sets out this problem formally, and resolves the equilibrium outcomes. The model is calibrated with the actual rates that have been set recen..

This paper offers a primer on the basic economics of film finance and standard practices in the U.S. movie industry. It takes the U.S. movie industry as a case in point to study how excess risk and uncertainty around financing new projects are processed and managed by private sector entities and what market-based solutions are developed to prevent market failure. The paper summarizes the most common types of financial deals on the ground and reoccurring funding sources for new content production and distribution in the past twenty years. In particular, this research discusses the prominent role of intellectual property (IP) in financial transactions in the audiovisual sector. Research findin..

In this paper I investigate the effect of competition on language diversity in a cultural market, the movies market, in which language is a relevant characteristic of the good. I analyse the case of the bilingual region of Catalonia to empirically test the effect of competition in two stages of the supply chain – the distribution and the exhibition – on the availability of films in the weaker language. I create a unique data set of all the screenings in the region over 10 months from different sources using advanced web-scraping techniques. I find that the concentration at the distribution level reduces the percentage of films in Catalan by 4.04 percentage points compared with the counte..

In online platforms, users sign in and evaluate items (as movies, music, video games, etc) through a numeric score and a textual comment. The underlying structure of users and items configures a bipartite network. Sometimes the opinions of the users are split alongside political or cultural factions. As a result, these items exhibit bi-polar distributions of scores. This manuscript proposes a method of detection of Extremely Bi-polar Items (EBI), and, through a statistical matching of these with an ideal control group of other items, a method to adjust the semantic inference of patterns associated with them. Results of the semantic inference on 436 items and 152, 844 reviews from platform Me..

In this paper, we examine how public libraries promote development of good reading habits among the users who come to access for information. It explores how far–in this digital age, public and academic libraries are able to meet the information needs of society. By developing a theoretical model of access to and usage of information based on axioms that set forth the role of public libraries in the services of society, we attempt to examine and analyze how PLs promote adult literacy drive that have positive contribution to society. Community public library systems are thus examined and their role model clearly decimated. We find that public libraries have still much relevance in supportin..

The ability to transmit accurate information that does not deceive its readership, and the use of images that reflects the truth of the fact that they are supposed to be representing, should be an important principle and basal tenet of any traditional or social media-based news or journalistic organization or platform. It is not uncommon to find images or photos that accompany the text of a news article, and the visual impact of an image, as is often expressed in a cliché, can sometimes add much more value than merely the text itself. Whereas some fake news is patently untrue, another gray zone of journalism that is affected by fake news may encompass bias, spin and deceit. Absent rigorous ..

The aim of this contribution is to offer a specific analysis of creativity focused on the role of workplaces and their technical equipment. We develop an organological analysis within five industrial firms. Organology is a joint analysis of technical, social, and individual dimensions to develop new objects. We question the resources for supporting creativity and their capacity of enlarging or weakening the creativity of designers. We show that creative capacities are now assisted by powerful digital instruments which raise the question of the dynamics of capacities for creation of professionals.

One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches. Since the ranking is still based on the results of these matches, fairness requires guaranteeing that the opponents of the clubs are of the same strength. This paper investigates whether the currently used rating of the teams, the UEFA club coefficient, can be improved by taking the games played in the national leagues into account. According to our logistic regression models, a variant of the Elo method provides a higher accuracy in forecasting Champions ..

Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data and apply them, along with text analysis methods, to measure the representation of skin color, race, gender, and age in award-winning children's books widely read in homes, classrooms, and libraries over the last century. We find that more characters with darker skin color appear over time, but the most influential books persistently depict characters with lighter skin color, on average, than other books, even after conditioning on race; we also find that children are depicted with light..

Evidence suggests that the Out of Africa Migration has impacted the degree of intra-population genetic and phenotypic diversity across the globe. This paper provides the first evidence that this migration has shaped cultural diversity. Leveraging a folklore catalogue of 958 oral traditions across the world, we show that ethnic groups further away from East Africa along the migratory routes have lower folkloric diversity. This pattern is consistent with the compression of genetic, phenotypic, and phonemic traits along the Out of Africa migration routes, setting conditions for the emergence and proliferation of differential cultural diversity and economic development across the world.

The objective of this research is to explore the relationship between the cultural specificities of governance in the Moroccan context and the sustainability of unlisted Moroccan family businesses in times of crisis. To produce our results, we opted for a qualitative approach based on semi-directive interviews with 20 CEOs of unlisted Moroccan family businesses, 6 of which are large companies, 8 are SMEs, and 6 are VSEs. Our results explain that the search for sustainability by family governance in times of crisis is dependent on three cultural specificities, explicitly: family reputation, religiosity norms, and the logic of strategic imitation. These specificities drive the governance of Mo..