Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist

This dissertation provides new insights on creativity and the lives of creative people, by availing of unique data-sets covering the lives, works and emotional states of famous music composers. The underlying research documents the long-run persistence of a society’s preference towards cultural goods and shows that the geography of composer births displays remarkable continuity over a period of seven centuries. It formalizes and documents the trade-off between agglomeration economies (beneficial