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January 16, 2018

From CEPR Discussion Paper:
Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? In this paper we match data on thousands of notable individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical data on city institutions and population. After documenting several stylized facts, we show that the formation of creative clusters is not preceded by increases in city size. Instead, the emergence of city institutions protecting economic and political freedoms facilitates the attraction and production of creative talent.

From Harper's:
Business researchers posited that busyness has replaced leisure as a marker of prestige for Americans, constituting “an alternative kind of conspicuous consumption that operates by shifting the focus from the preciousness and scarcity of goods to the preciousness and scarcity of individuals.”

From Harper's:
Among Germans, 51.4 percent would pay €50 to test a possibly fake €2,000 blue sapphire purchased while on holiday in Sri Lanka, 6.8 percent would like to know what they are getting for Christmas, and 90.4 percent would not like to know the cause of a romantic partner’s eventual death.

From The Guardian (Jim Crace on "The book I wish I’d written"):
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Inventing such bizarre and mischievous locations and describing them with such flair must have been a lot of fun.

From NBER Working Paper:
Quality of public institutions has been recognized as a crucial determinant of macroeconomic outcomes. We propose that a country's intrinsic level of openness (due to population size, geography, or exogenous trade opportunities) affects its incentives in investing in better institutions. We present a simple theory and extensive empirical evidence validating the role of intrinsic openness in determining governance quality. This suggests an indirect but important channel for globalization to improve welfare by raising the quality of governance.
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