[6][7] In 1957, Caves embarked on his academic career in the Department of Economics, chaired by Joe S. Bain, at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1962, he moved back to Harvard University, where he was appointed Professor of Economics and lectured in industrial organization and international trade.
In a seminal work, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce, Caves examined a wide range of visual and performing arts – including cinema and television, theatre, music, book publishing, and toys and games – in order to investigate how the theory of contracts and the logic of economic organization affect the production of "simple creative goods" (like art), as well as more "complex goods" (such as theatre plays or motion pictures), which require teams of artists with diverse talents.
In this respect, his work comes close to that of the American sociologist, Howard S. Becker, who, two decades earlier, put forward a theory of art worlds.
Scholars in economic geography, political science, anthropology, and cultural studies have all taken Caves's work as their starting point in their own analyses of different forms of creative industries – primarily in the United States and Europe, but also in the Asian region (in particular, perhaps, Japan [9]).