Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am writing in order to draw you attention to my unusual (economic) research on the history of classical composers and their music.

In a recent paper I estimate the causal gain of locating in important centres for music (such as Paris in XIX century) on the production of classical composers. I find that composers who worked in geographic clusters have composed approximately one additional work of significance every three years. I further find that the disclosed productivity gains are attributed to peer effects, that is, the interaction that took place between composers in geographic clusters. The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Urban Economics, a top-field outlet (here the paper: http://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/juecon/v73y2013i1p94-110.html).

Here are several other research papers on the lives of classical composers (http://ideas.repec.org/f/pbo539.html).

Please get in touch if you have any comments on these...

Wow .. thats really interesting. I will take a look at the papers.

I have a question for you.

If you think the additional works from these composers arrises from their collaboration due to proximity: do you think that today's modern technology means that anyone can share ideas or concepts anywhere over the globe (or at least where people have internet access) - and so we should see either a normalisation (balancing out) of these geographic clusters -or an increase in great works overall.

??

a kind of 'global village' effect?