We assess the long-term financial returns from high-quality collectible real assets, and review the unique risks that are associated with such investments. Over the period 1900-2012, art, stamps, and musical instruments (violins) have appreciated at an average annual rate of 6.4%-6.9% in nominal...

A five cent $0.05 investment in Bitcoin on July 17, 2010, the first date in which there appears to have been a published value had grown to $7,383.39 on July 18, 2018. While Bitcoin as a currency has existed for less than a decade ̶ it had a very limited liquidity and usage during the first few...

We study the impact of colors of paintings on prices in the art auction market and incorporate color attributes of non-figurative paintings in pricing models. A one standard deviation increase in the percentages of blue (red) hue leads to premiums of 10.63% (4.20%). We also conduct laboratory...

We study price determinants and investment performance of art based on a vast sample of transactions around the world over the past 60 years. Art has appreciated at a real (nominal) annual return of 2.49% (6.24%). Higher art returns are reached for paintings at high-end of the price...

While trust is the cornerstone in the functioning of any market, it is of particular importance in the markets that are unregulated, illiquid, and opaque, such as the art market. We therefore examine the role of authenticity, as captured by the provenance information, on the sales probability of...

Rare books of political economy are eminently collectable. Using historical prices, I employ hedonic regressions to estimate financial returns to collecting the works of ten eminent political economists and develop a price index for this corpus of collectables. For the observation period...

This paper contains a new review of the research of the last decade that has been designed to shed light on how the art auction system works, what it indicates about price formation, and how well it performs. We begin with a short description of the mechanics of the auction system and then...

Employing the art-collection records of Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine, we consider whether early-stage art investors can be understood as venture capitalists. Because the Tremaines bought artists' work very close to an artwork's creation, with 69% of works in our study purchased within one year...

This paper examines the risk-return characteristics of investment grade gems (white diamonds, colored diamonds and other types of gems including sapphires, rubies, and emeralds). The transactions are coming from gem auctions and span the period 1999-2012. Over our time frame, the annual nominal...

This paper investigates the price determinants and investment performance of classic cars comprising various categories starting from veteran cars (built between 1888 and 1907) up to modern classics (built between 1975 and 1990). We examine a sample of 29,000 classic car auction sales conducted...