In the last decades a new organizational population of private museums has seen substantial proliferation. While multiple hypotheses for the spread of this new form have been raised, systematic analyses of these have been lacking. In particular, the rise of private museums has been hypothesized to stem from tax incentives, reductions in government spending, increasing inequality and increasing elite wealth. Combining various socio-economic and art field data sources, I conduct quantitative tests of these hypotheses with datasets of 1241, 2474 and 3148 country-years using multilevel negative binomial regression models. While I find support for a positive effect of tax incentives, government spending is associated non-monotonically (inverse U-shaped) with private museum founding (not, as hypothesized, negatively). Furthermore the effects of inequality are divergent, as a positive association with private museum founding is found for wealth inequality and a negative one for income inequality. Finally, elite wealth effects are too small, statistically insignificant, and conditional on wealth threshold and dataset to conclude a general relation with private museum founding. I conclude with a call for advancing theoretical elaboration and measurement precision to further investigate founding determinants.

中文翻译：

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私人博物馆建立的结构预测


在过去的几十年里，私人博物馆的新组织群体大幅增加。虽然人们对这种新形式的传播提出了多种假设，但缺乏对这些假设的系统分析。特别是，私人博物馆的兴起被认为源于税收优惠、政府支出减少、不平等加剧和精英财富增加。结合各种社会经济和艺术领域的数据源，我使用多级负二项式回归模型，用 1241、2474 和 3148 个国家/地区年的数据集对这些假设进行了定量检验。虽然我发现税收激励措施具有积极作用，但政府支出与私人博物馆的创建呈非单调（倒 U 形）相关（而不是像假设的那样呈负相关）。此外，不平等的影响是不同的，因为私人博物馆的建立与财富不平等呈正相关，而与收入不平等呈负相关。最后，精英财富效应太小，在统计上微不足道，并且以财富阈值和数据集为条件，无法得出与私人博物馆创办的一般关系。最后，我呼吁推进理论阐述和测量精度，以进一步研究创始决定因素。