Abstract
Artists have traditionally been depicted in academic literature as younger and more educated workers who gain less economic returns from their human capital investment and earn significantly lower self-employment income than workers showing similar human capital features on more traditional labour markets. Filling an important gap in the literature relating to Canadian artists and their financial situation on the labour market, this article estimates the effect of human capital features and other socio-demographic variables on self-employment income of 9 categories of artists using data drawn from the Canadian census of 2006. Results show that experience is not generally associated with an increase of earnings for Canadian artists. Moreover, in opposition to human capital theory, a higher level of education is not consistently associated with higher earnings. Rather, it seems that only particular diplomas yield positively on earnings depending on artistic specialty. This indicates that there exist a few precise profitable profiles of education in each different field of the arts. Our findings constitute a major contribution in cultural economics while providing useful information to educational policy designers in Canada.