Why do some individuals pirate digital music while others pay for it? Using data on a sample of undergraduate students, we study the determinants of music piracy by looking at whether a respondent’s last song was obtained illegally or not. In doing so, we incorporate (i) the...

The issue of modelling international trade in works of art has been taken up in the paper. It presents the gravity approach to the international trade in art in European Community countries. The analysis is based on Eurostat international trade data (Harmonised System for export and import...

A new heteroskedastic hedonic regression model is suggested which takes into account time-varying volatility and is applied to a blue chips art market. A nonparametric local likelihood estimator is proposed, and this is more precise than the often used dummy variables method. The empirical...

Price indices for heterogenous goods such as real estate or fine art constitute crucial information for institutional or private investors considering alternative investments in times of financial markets turmoil. Classical mean-variance analysis of alternative investments has been hampered by...

Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the effects of extracurricular music activities on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality,...

This paper uses stamp catalogue prices to investigate the returns on British collectible postage stamps over the period 1900–2008. We find an annualized return on stamps of 7.0% in nominal terms, or 2.9% in real terms. These returns are higher than those on bonds but below those on equities....

Trends in arts and culture tend to be longer-lasting and less fragile than in other fields such as clothing design. Most herding models are not able to explain such stability, instead predicting informational cascades to be fragile and fads to be frequent. The present contribution is able to...

In this paper, we examine the validity of hedonic models for estimating heterogeneous assets returns. We look into the art markets, and show that the returns on hedonic indices strictly depend on the specifications of the model. Different sets of variables lead to different returns. This means...

Publishers of computer software and music claimed losses of nearly $16 billion to piracy in 1999. Theoretically, however, piracy may raise legitimate demand through positive demand-side externalities, sampling, and sharing. Accordingly, the actual impact of piracy on the legitimate demand is an...

A central finding of the modern labor market literature is that labor supply responses tend to be concentrated along the extensive margin (labor force participation) rather than the intensive margin (hours of work). Yet, the literature on the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) focuses solely on...