Municipal Financing of the U.S. Fine Arts Museum: A Historical Rationale
探讨市政资助美术馆的市场失灵依据，通过19世纪末的价格与边际成本关系检验，发现教育外部性是当时公共补贴的主要理由。
Municipal involvement in the finance of fine arts museums raises the question: Just which market failure serves to rationalize this public subsidy? Two contenders are prominent in the literature: decreasing costs and education externalities. The relationship of price to marginal cost provides an operational test to distinguish among the two rationales. Scattered data from the 1880s and 1890s as well as contemporary discussion indicate that, implausible as it may seem now, education externalities constituted the operational justification for the public subsidy.