Abstract
Using individual-level data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) between 2006 and 2021, I study the labor market experiences of artists. First, I find a decline in the relative earnings of artists to non-artists from zero to a 15% disadvantage. After controlling for demographic differences, the decline is sharper, declining from a 15% earnings disadvantage to 30%. That the inclusion of demographic controls raises the earnings gap suggests there is positive selection into the arts. Second, these differences decline in magnitude to 4.4%, but remain statistically significant, after exploiting variation among artists and non-artists in the same industry-year and major occupation. Third, when restricting the set of individuals to those with at least a college degree, those with a fine arts degree also incur an earnings and employment penalty even if they work in the arts. These results highlight the increasing financial precariousness of artists over the past decade.
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Notes
See Fullerton (1991) for an early discussion of the rationale for public support of the arts, and Rushton (2022) for arguments for and against the view that the arts create positive externalities. Makridis et al. (2022) also explain how music education in early childhood plays an especially formative role in their development, which would generate positive externalities later in life.
To generate these numbers, I use the “perwt” sample weight in the ACS and drop all non-employed workers.
Borowiecki and Dahl (2021) also explore spatial heterogeneity in creative clusters with some evidence that artists come from wealthier families. I find that there is a 0.44 correlation between the average log annual earnings and the proportion of artists in a given state and year, but more work is needed to understand how parental income shifts the decision to enter the arts. This is consistent with Boar and Lashkari (2022) who find that children of higher income parents select into jobs that have greater non-wage amenities than their parents.
However, a review of management science literature highlights the intent in organizations is to promote employee engagement to raise performance and well-being, hel** to attract and retain talent. In this sense, artists are like other workers in the labor market where the hope is that they like what they do.
Not included in the 27-1 and 27-2 SOC codes are: designers (SOC 27-102), athletes, coaches, umpires, and related workers (SOC 27-202).
Because of skewness and non-linearities in the earnings distribution, there are important qualitative differences in the level versus log of earnings. Annual earnings for artists are $53,430, whereas log earnings are 10.30. In contrast, annual earnings for non-artists are $49,064, whereas log earnings are 10.37. Using the log helps smooth the distribution out to account for outliers, but the main results (under the preferred specification with controls) are robust in levels and other functional forms; the controls reduce the impact of outliers.
Whether an artist is employed, unfortunately, cannot be used as an outcome variable since artists are classified as those with a given occupation in a year. If “usual occupation” was observed over time, then employment regressions could be estimated.
This result is not surprising given the evidence from Table 4 documenting the negative returns to holding a masters degree among artists. In particular, these results suggest that formal education among artists does not produce an earnings premium (setting aside the additional costs associated with tuition).
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Makridis, C.A. The labor market returns of being an artist: evidence from the United States, 2006–2021. J Cult Econ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-023-09490-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-023-09490-x