Labor Market and Education for Artists and the Creative Industries: Some Descriptive Results from Denmark

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the labor market for artists and in the creative industries more broadly: How important is a formal education for jobs in the creative industries? How are the careers of people with a creative education? Do they work in the creative industries or outside the creative industries? How is the profile of the jobs within the creative industries? Alper and Wassall (2006) present an overview of the economic, mainly empirical research concerning the labor market of artists. Different types of studies can be distinguished: theoretical models of artistic career processes, qualitative interviews and data, retrospective surveys and panel data based on surveys (either true panel studies or quasi panel studies). Some of the most extended studies on artists’ earnings are done by Alper and Wassall on American census data, where data comes from peoples selfreporting in surveys, and peoples’ occupation is based on time spent at work during a single reference week. This do obvious have some drawbacks. Register data from Statistics Denmark representing true panel data, makes it possible to overcome some of these problems and gain new knowledge on the career patterns of artists, their income, the importance of education, multiple jobholding etc. The register data used in this paper includes a lot of variables on socio-economy, income, employment etc. for the Danish population in the period 1994-2003. The paper includes a discussion and delimitation of artist and the creative industries, and presents new empirical results on the labor market for artists and in the creative industries