Abstract
Research on the causes of conflict-induced migration is hindered by the lack of adequately disaggregated data. The underlying study overcomes this problem through the use of historical data on 164 prominent classical composers born after 1800. I analyze the impact of war on the probability to emigrate of composers, investigate the associated dynamics and shed light on the choice of a destination country in times of war. I find that the incidence of inter-state wars increases composers’ probability to emigrate by around 7 % and the incidence of intra-state wars by roughly 19 %. The results imply that conflict impacts the migration intensity with a lag of approximately 1 year. Furthermore, the choice of a destination country is significantly affected by the incidence of war and less efficient from a career’s point of view during war. Finally, I find heterogeneous responses to war based on individual’s quality. While the better composers are more likely to emigrate in times of peace, it is not so anymore if a war breaks out. In times of war, all artists are affected by war and are prone to emigrate.
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Notes
For example, if a group of people becomes expelled from a country during the incidence of war, the specification might not pick up that the migration was indeed forced as opposed to chosen. In some robustness specifications, countries that have seen expulsions are dropped and consistent results are found. Such tests might, however, not pick up the whole extent of forced migration. If this was the case, the estimates should be viewed as the upper bound of conflict-induced migration rates.
While costly or imperfect information can reduce migration (e.g. Dustmann 1997), information about economic and social opportunities at the destination may stimulate migration flows (Fischer et al. 1997). See also Sharp and Weisdorf (2012) for an interesting discussion of factors that have led to the emergence of a civil war—the French Revolution.
This is somewhat in contrary to early theories of migration that emphasized differences in salary levels as the primary cause of migration (e.g. Borjas 1987).
See O’Hagan and Borowiecki (2010) for a discussion and an example of country- or marketing-bias in some recognised reference works.
See also Borowiecki (2012) for a summary of composers’ conditions in the analyzed time period.
Note that the biographies included in the Grove Music Dictionary provide primarily music-related information (e.g. music-related parental background or duration of music training); any other records such as duration of general education are not consistently available. Note also that from now on with each reference to composer, I mean‚ prominent composer, the focus of this study. As the data encompasses only male composers, I use the male form.
The COW database provides records whether combat occurred in any of the following regions: Western Hemisphere, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia or Oceania.
This is less true for remote wars fought in the second half of the twentieth century. The results would, however, remain consistent if those conflicts were excluded (not reported).
The impact of wars that occurred for example on a different continent might be indirect at the best and is not the prime focus in this article. It must be also noted that as the available war data sets do not provide any details on the exact micro location of wars (for instance on city-level), I am unable to differentiate between situations when a composer indeed witnessed a war. The further presented results must be interpreted in light of this caveat. From now on, I use the term ‘international war’ to denote wars that had combats occurring in the region of composers’ country of residence.
I exclude the following composers: Alban Berg, Henry Cowell, Olivier Messiaen, Nikolay Myaskovsky, Carl Orff, Richard Wagner and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The inclusion of a set of indicator functions for each composer is necessary, as estimation of a conditional fixed-effects probit model is not possible. This is so as there does not exist a sufficient statistic allowing the fixed effects to be conditioned out of the likelihood.
As proposed by Vaubel (2005), a high degree of political fragmentation could significantly lower the migration cost between neighbouring jurisdictions. The employed country control variables account for this type of differences.
One would not expect the effect to be reverse, that is, a war would not be expected to break as a result to emigration of composers. Conflict-induced migration could, however, occur in anticipation of war. Section 4.3 Migration and War provides an analysis on the temporal dynamics and discloses the extent of migration in expectation as well as in consequence of wars.
See Appendix 1 for an extended list and essential background information of composers included in this study.
For intra-state wars the number of deaths covers the total battle deaths of all participants, i.e., of the government and non-government forces. Both variables are obtained from the COW database.
The results are also robust to a number of additional tests. Dropping countries with extreme characteristics (e.g. Russia) does not alter the findings. Neither does the inclusion of the life period when a composer has been in education. The results remain stable also if the years after World War II or either of the world wars was excluded. All results from the robustness estimations are available upon request.
See Howe (1999) for a review of the relationship between individual’s early family background conditions and mature attainments of creative people.
An alternative mechanism is that composers with family members involved in a music profession can possibly avail of their network and have better access to demand and related supply industries. If this was the case, the introduced proxy of intrinsic ability would be potentially biased by the presence of social network. The further presented estimates on the indicators for music background of family members have to be thus interpreted as an upper bound of inborn ability.
As the focus of this analysis lies on the choice of a particular country, rather than on modelling whether immigration occurred, Model (1) cannot be used. It would be preferred to estimate a model that accounts for differences in characteristics between all possible destination countries and the origin country, i.e., a model that would also provide insights on the issue why a composer has not chosen a particular country. It is refrained, however, from this approach due to the lack of data on all potential destinations, i.e., all countries that could have been chosen but were not.
The formal model to be estimated is given by: P((Immigrate during war itc ) = 1) = β 0 + β 1(Been before at destination) tc + β 2(Difference in number of composers) tc + β 3(Difference in population) tc + β 4k(Difference in GDP pc) tc + β 5Age itc + β 6Age 2 itc + β 7Year t + β 8Country c + ε itc .
The results are very similar in a robustness specification that excludes immigration to USA (not reported).
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the European Workshop of Cultural Economics (Aydin), at the Ester/Globaleuronet Research Design Course (Barcelona) and at seminars at University College Dublin and University of the Basque Country. This work greatly benefited thanks to comments from Victoria Ateca-Amestoy, Catia Batista, Stefano Battilossi, Claude Diebolt, Javier Gardeazabal, Cormac O’Grada, John O’Hagan, Kevin O’Rourke, Jeffrey Williamson, participants at the mentioned conferences and seminars, the editor Claude Diebolt and anonymous referees. The author acknowledges the manifold support provided by Lucie Duggan, and a generous research fund provided by John O’Hagan and the Regional Basque Government.
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Borowiecki, K.J. Conflict-induced migration of composers: an individual-level study. Cliometrica 7, 237–266 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-012-0087-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-012-0087-6