 Economist David Throsby established "cultural economics" in the hierarchy of the American Economic Association's index of topics considered "economics" in 1994.Ekelund has been associated with such studies for several decades, conducting studies with colleagues in the late 20th and early 21st centuries using a small auction sample of Latin American art.Later, with colleagues and an acute interest in American art, he analyzed a database of 14,000 observations on 80 American artists born in the 19th and 20th centuries.