The effect of cultural and creative production on human capital: Evidence from European regions

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