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Title: Public Investment in the Arts and Cultural Agglomeration: Evidence from the New Deal

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: What is the impact of extending public funding to the arts? I draw evidence from the first major instance of federal funding to the arts via New Deal programming to evaluate the impact of artist employment programs on the per capita number of artistic professionals in US cities over time. I employ a set of New Deal spending instruments in an instrumental variables differences-in-differences design to identify the causal impacts of these programs. I determine that the program induced large increases in local per capita levels of writers, theater and film industry workers, and certain kinds of visual artists that have endured to the present-day. Namely, present-day population-shares of writers and artists in photography and design increased by approximately 100 and 1000 professionals respectively per 1 million people in response to an investment of $1,000 per professional in 1935. I document positive, but less temporally persistent impacts on music and general visual arts. A subsequent variance decomposition demonstrates modest, yet non-negligible explanatory power (5-15%) of Federal Project Number One in determining variation within and across cities in post New Deal decades.

Url: https://jakobbrounstein.github.io/files/brounstein_returnarts_20230125.pdf

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Authors: Brounstein, Jakob

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Land Use/Urban Organization

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