Surveys of artists' location choices show that they disproportionately reside in large cities. This paper introduces a model that attempts to explain this urban preference. The model includes four factors: access to other artists; access to consumer demand; access to service jobs; and housing affordability. These four factors are combined in a spatial equilibrium model. An equilibrium spatial distribution of artists is derived from the model and is correlated with the actual distribution among Swedish municipalities. Subsequently, the model is used for an econometric estimation of factor effects. The results show that access to other artists and local access to service jobs are important localization factors. Educated labor used as a proxy for consumer demand has a significant effect on artists' location choices.
This study investigates whether news coverage about unemployment affects people's perceptions of the state of the economy. I compile a German state-level data set, based on household surveys and information obtained from analyzing 35 newspapers. The data are used to separate media effects from real economic consequences, taking advantage of two sources of exogenous variation. First, I exploit the salience of “milestones” in the number of unemployed. The news value of these milestones, which is not based on economic fundamentals, causes the media to report more about unemployment than usually. Second, I show that the amount of reports decreases when competing newsworthy events occur at the time of the release of the monthly unemployment statistics. Instrumental variable estimates indicate that a one standard deviation increase in coverage accounts for about a quarter of the average monthly change in the index of economic perceptions.
Airbnb and other home-sharing platforms have been facing increasing regulation over the past years, mainly in the form of restricting short-term rentals through day caps. In contrast, as one of the first countries in the world, Denmark applied a collaborative strategy: In 2018, the government negotiated an agreement with Airbnb about the transmission of income data from the platform to the tax agency. We analyze how this data-sharing agreement affected hosts' behavior on the platform, using a difference-in-differences approach with Sweden as a counterfactual. We find that the agreement reduced hosts’ propensity to list property on the platform by 14%, while increasing listing prices by 11%. Our results indicate that platform exits were mostly limited to single-property hosts. In contrast, hosts with many properties and those in areas with initially low Airbnb penetration made their rental objects more often available and managed to increase the number of bookings. Overall, the findings imply that the data-sharing agreement not only helped to increase tax compliance but also led to a commercialization and spatial re-organization of short-term renting in Denmark.