goods, we would expect historical agglomerations of cultural activities to be highlypath-dependent. In support of this assumption, Table 1, Panel A, shows a simplecomparison of cultural activities in locations with a baroque opera house andlocations with an opera house that was built after the baroque era. Overall, weobserve 92 opera houses today in Germany, 29 of which can be traced back to thebaroque era (cf. Zo¨chling 1983). To measure cultural activities, we exploit detailedinformation from social insurance records and a special social insurance forfreelance artists (cf. Haak 2005), and calculate the number of artists per 1000inhabitants on the German district level as an average over the years 2002–2007.Together, these two data sources allow us to draw a comprehensive picture oflocations’ cultural amenities today, which, among other things, led us to observesignificantly higher shares of artists in baroque opera house locations. Interestingly,these differences are not restricted to those types of artists that are typicallyemployed in opera houses, such as singers and musicians. They include a widerange of artists and thus truly support our argument that baroque opera housesinitiated a diverse cultural scene that is still present today. Further support for ourargument is provided in the last row of Table 1, where we exploit information fromthe 1907 census (Statistik des Deutschen Reichs 1909a, b). Here, we findinformation on the number of workers engaged in creative businesses. Using thesedata, we compare the employment share of artists in 1907 across the same two typesof locations. Again, we find a significantly higher share of artists in baroque operahouse locations, thus underlining the time persistence of these early culturalconcentrations.