Moral Rights Laws and Income Disparity Between Artists in High and Low GDP States

The United States' laissez-faire approach to moral rights legislation has left many academics questioning the impact that these laws have on artists' welfare. In using artists' income as one component of measuring overall well-being, states with additional statewide moral rights legislation have been shown to contribute to more significant artist losses, in contrast to states with only federal legislation. At the same time, moral rights laws have been shown to have no impact on artists' choice of residency, leaving some artists possibly disadvantaged regarding their choice of residency. Utilizing a difference in differences framework, this paper explores the impact of moral rights legislation on artists' weekly incomes between moral rights states of varying outputs of GDP. Although results suggested that artists would lose approximately $0.18 per one billion dollar increase in GDP at the statewide level, after conducting an additional t-test, these findings were shown to have no statistical significance. Several limitations, most prominently a lack of data availability in the pre-law values required for the difference in differences framework, may have contributed to these findings. These indeterminate results leave the question of whether some artists remain economically disadvantaged as a result of moral rights legislation uncertain.