Creativity Over Time and Space

Michel Serafinelli,Guido Tabellini

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3070203

Abstract

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. Our main variable of interest is the number of famous creatives (scaled to local population) born in a city during a century, but we also look at famous immigrants (based on location of death). We first document several stylized facts: famous births and immigrants are spatially concentrated and clustered across disciplines, creative clusters are persistent but less than population, and spatial mobility has remained stable over the centuries. Next, we show that the emergence of city institutions protecting economic and political freedoms and promoting local autonomy facilitates the attraction and production of creative talent.

Highlights

Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains
What explains the formation and decay of such clusters of creativity? Are they driven by local economic conditions, by specific features of local institutions, or by mere chance? More generally, asides from these exceptional clusters, how concentrated are creative activities in time and space? Is there co-agglomeration of creative people in different fields? And most important of all, what general lessons can be drawn from the historical analysis of creative clusters, to foster innovation and the production of creative talent? Given the central role of creativity and innovation in human progress and economic development, knowing the answer to these questions is important
This section explores the determinants of births of creative individuals, addressing a specific question: what features of city institutions are associated with the production of creative talent, as measured by births of notable individuals? In particular, we study the role that transitions into and out of the status of Commune play in the births of famous creatives

Summary

Introduction

Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. We exploit information on the dates and location of birth and death of notable individuals in different creative endeavours (arts, humanities, science and business) throughout Europe. The source for these data is Freebase.com, a large data base owned by Google and coded by Schich et al (2014), that stores information from a variety of publicly editable sources, most notably Wikipedia. After integrating these individual data with additional information scraped from the internet, we match them with a historical data set on European cities and local institutions put together by Bairoch et al (1988) and Bosker et al (2013). Our unit of observation is a city in a particular century between the XI and XIX centuries

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Discussion

Conclusion