Flocking to the Crowd: Cultural Entrepreneur Mobility Guided by Homophily, Market Size, or Amenities?

Abstract

Economic activity and innovation clusters in urban areas. Urban economics points to important knowledge and productivity spillovers in cities, in addition to other factors like thicker markets, lower transportation costs, and consumptive amenities. Yet thus far little work has analyzed how these different factors drive migration decisions of arts-related entrepreneurs, especially when they work in online platforms for fundraising. We use data on the largest US crowdfunding platform to identify relocating creators, allowing us to identify which kinds of regions are attracting and retaining more of this sort of talent. We test for the influence of clustering based on homophily, migration to larger markets, and relocation toward particular geographic amenities. Overall we find the strongest evidence for homophily and some distinct tendencies favoring certain regional amenities. Importantly, we both identify general relocation patterns among crowdfunding creatives and break down the attracting features for different types of creators. An examination of (net) migration by different categories of projects, such as musicians or filmmakers, reveals important heterogeneity in the attractors. For example, musicians are drawn stronger music sectors while writers seek more isolation from other writers. This helps inform the interregional competition for talent and "creative class," especially among a group of relatively footloose arts-and culture-intensive entrepreneurs.2 economies, then rather little is known about the factors that attract or retain this creative talent. Attracting cultural entrepreneurs, especially in a digital age, may not follow traditional clustering patterns.Human capital is one of the most important factors in today's knowledge economy and is an essential part of any industrial cluster (Porter 1990). Hundreds of scholars around the world emphasize the importance of co-location of related industries (Piore and Sable 1984, Porter 1990). Initially, clusters were based on the location of their basic resources, mostly natural resources such as energy and access to transport. Over time, as the industrial process became flexible, transportation costs went down, and markets became increasingly important, industrial clusters specialized in parts of the production chain such as research, design, development, and manufacturing. Today, in the global economy, most advanced companies focus on R&D rather than manufacturing their own product. Subsequently, the ability of highly skilled human capital to transfer knowledge, by leveraging their social capital, became the most important resource that determines the ability of industries and regional development (Granovetter 1973, Putnam 1995. As cities compete for resources, the most sought-after resource became human capital.According to Moretti (2012), the polarized US has some cities attracting more high-skilled workers than others, leading to winning and losing cities. On one side, "brain hub" cities include those with the largest share of workers with college degree...

Using Taxes to Attract the Creative Class in the Presence of a Region-Specific Rent

“…Second, when pondering what distinguishes the behavior of creative class entrepreneurs from that of all other entrepreneurs, it is helpful to focus on what authors such as Howkins (2002) have called the "creative economy". The creative economy positions itself at the intersection of economics, innovation, social value, and sustainability.…”

“…Given this lacuna in the literature, our objective in this note is to analyze how the existence of a region-specific rent affects the efficacy of tax policy in attracting creative class members to a particular region. 3 Before proceeding further, we would like to point out that Conley and Whitacre (2016), Falcioglu and Kurtoglu (2016), Batabyal andYoo (2018), andNoonan et al (2021) have analyzed alternate aspects of the regional behavior of entrepreneurial creative class members. That said, the reader should understand that there is absolutely no overlap between the contents of these papers and what we are studying in this note.…”

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