Major influences on circus attendance

Although circus represents one of the most accessible art forms, the economics of the arts and culture has completely neglected to address this topic. This paper represents an attempt to fill in this lack by identifying the determinants of the demand for circus in Italy, both in terms of structural characteristics of the shows and socio-economic factors that have impact on it. To this aim, we collected information on the tournée of the bigger circuses performing in Italy during 2005 and 2006. The results show a positive elasticity of demand to income and, differently from similar studies on performing arts, to ticket price. There also are differences between circuses in the importance of animal acts.