Peer-Reviewed Articles

Cultural and creative production (CCP) can create, renovate, and shape places' socio-economic environments. Recent contributions suggest that culture can activate a set of cognitive and productive mechanisms that form the basis of human capital (HC) dynamics. Bridging these two streams of research, the present paper investigates possible causal relationships between CCP and HC at the regional level. Empirically, we used measures of employment in the cultural and creative sectors as proxies for CCP and applied generalized method of moments (GMM) panel estimations to yearly data from 283 European NUTS 2 regions from 2014 to 2020. The findings suggest that CCP positively affects regions' average levels of HC even controlling for several economic and demographic factors.

Aging affects workers' productivity following an inverted U-shaped relationship. However, the adverse effects of an aging population can be offset by endogenous technological adaptations at the aggregate level. Despite this, we know little about the intricate relationships operating at the regional level between aging, localized external economies and their effects on productivity. To fill this gap, we rely on data about manufacturing firms across eight European countries at the Nuts-2 level and adopt an instrumental variable approach to deal with residual endogeneity. Our findings indicate that while the impact of aging on productivity is positive, localized external effects on productivity disappear when the proportion of the workforce in the older age bracket reaches 19.68% for specialization economies and 24.28% for urbanization economies.