Il caso particolare dei beni culturali: un excursus tra teoria e pratica

The first part of this work analyzes the problem of safeguarding cultural goods within a legal framework, stressing the importance of an international approach through the means of the Convention of 1972. The second section illustrates through a literature review, the origin of the interest of economic science towards cultural assets as goods with unique characteristics within a unique environment. Emphasis is placed on the presence of different types of values that arise both for art aficionados and for those who are not, assimilating cultural goods with quasi-public goods. In this regard, there are several problematics associated with such markets especially for the peculiarities of the benefits that a section of the population derives as being art consumers. After the main theoretical review, an empirical one is undertaken describing the more applied approach of the stated preference methodology in cultural economics. Along with the empirical review, the acme of the main frictions between the established economic theory and the applied cultural economics is showcased. The thesis concludes with an empirical section that has some elements in common with the stated preference methodology in an attempt to determine which factors play a crucial role as drivers for individual to be donors in favor of the art. Through the means of a binary choice model estimated from a large dataset of the National Endowment for the Arts on the Public Participation in the Arts in 2011-2012, it will be shown which individual characteristics play an important role in determining donations to art institutions in the United States.