Creative class theory posits that creative people are attracted to places most conducive to creative activity. The association of the share of employment in the arts with various indicators of economic dynamism provides plausible support for this conjecture. We explicitly test this conjecture by modeling the 1990 share of employment in the arts at the county level, and then use the residual from this regression to explain differences in various measures of economic dynamism between 1990 and 2000. Our results support the hypothesis that an unobserved creative milieu that attracts artists increases local economic dynamism.