I'd be very interested in hearing about what you turn up. I've been playing around with this idea as part of a prolonged debate I've had with a friend of mine over the purported benefits of inequality. His claim was essentially that it takes an obscenely wealthy patron to create a Mozart and outsized rewards to provide sufficient motivation.

Presumably the first thing to figure out is what affects an individual economic agent's long-term output. There are definitely a lot of factors. Here are some off the top of my head, fwtw:

- capital available - education level - area of interest - availability of good mentorship - intrinsic emotional/psychological motivating force of income inequality (this is what you referred to earlier) - individual's exposure to "culture" of innovation/productivity