Sovereign financial stress and the preservation of tangible cultural heritage in Europe: Evidence from public cultural expenditure in eleven eurozone countries between 2006 and 2024
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- This thesis analyses how sovereign financial stress reduces the public expenditure through which European states protect their tangible cultural heritage. Using a balanced panel of eleven eurozone countries between 2006 and 2024, it replaces the crisis dummies of the existing literature with the ECB's SovCISS, a continuous index of sovereign stress, and tests five hypotheses: a direct effect on cultural expenditure, first as a share of GDP and then as a share of total expenditure, moderation by institutional quality, persistence, and non-linearity. Two-way fixed-effects estimates, with significance tests obtained using a fully enumerated wild cluster bootstrap, return null results throughout, and the design could only have detected contractions above roughly a quarter of the average cultural budget. What the panel isolates instead is a discontinuity confined to the few country-years in which a state lost access to market financing due to an EU-IMF programme. This variation is almost single-handedly carried by Greece. Stress appears to reach heritage budgets through rupture rather than along a gradient.