Meisha Stewart, an economics student at UCA, won an award for the best undergraduate paper at the annual conference held by the Society of Business, Industry, and Economics.
The title of her paper is: “Magnetic Cities: Testing for the Convergence of Artistic Clusters in the United States.”
In her study, Meisha finds that artists naturally gravitate toward areas that have low concentrations of artists.
Her findings provide evidence that undercut the well-known and popular argument made by Richard Florida claiming that cities need to actively subsidize the arts in order to attract artists to a location.
Meisha’s paper, which was her thesis paper for the UCA Honors Program, was written under the direction of faculty mentor, Dr. Joseph McGarrity, a Professor of Economics at UCA.