During World War II, artworks significantly outperformed all alternative investments in Occupied France. With the surge in demand for portable and easy-to-hide (discreet) assets such as artworks and collectible stamps, prices boomed. This suggests that discreet assets may be viewed as...

Using transactions from fine art auctions for 42 leading American contemporary artists I estimate the relationship between the value of a painting and the artist's age at the date of its execution. The econometric estimates show that artists born before 1920 were likely to have done their most...

How does an artist's death impact on the price of his or her works of art? We investigate this question in an infinite-horizon dynamic general equilibrium setting. Employing the open-loop Stackelberg equilibrium concept to describe the interactive behaviour of collectors and artists, we find...

This note investigates price-formation mechanisms at work in the private art market. An analysis is provided on pricing of new artwork for the first sale. In a model with five different types of agents using a bargaining game approach, the artist's preferred market channel is identified. The...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) has been used in a number of studies to explore the features of the art market (or individual artists). We claim that such studies have been based on unsuitable estimates of art market returns in the context of the CAPM methodology. The CAPM calls for...

We hypothesize the existence of a slow-moving fad component in art prices. Using unique panel survey data on art market participants' confidence levels in the outlook for a set of artists, we find that sentiment indeed predicts short-term returns

Measuring the psychic return of art investments is a debated issue in Cultural economics. Several works suggest Jensen's alpha as a measure of the psychic return. Since the Jensen's alpha is defined in the CAPM framework, its uncritical application as a measure of the psychic return may be...

For centuries, wealthy individuals and institutions have collected and consumed art for aesthetic pleasure. While anecdotal evidence suggests that some artworks have appreciated in value over time, few studies have documented investment returns in art systematically. In this article, we...

This paper highlights the paradoxical effects of increased price data in markets with difficult-to-value products where non-price factors are highly relevant. In the fine art market, the growth of market information providers facilitated access to auction price data, beneficial in a market noted...

An anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising began in northern China in 1899, dubbed the “Boxer Rebellion” by the foreign powers that subsequently invaded China. In the courseof events, troops of the Eight-Nation Alliance began to arrive in Beijing in August 1900 and occupied the city. During...

The art market in historical perspective -- The art sector in China : traditional, Maoist and globalized periods -- Main features of the art market : what is art? how to value it? how art trade is organized? -- Recessions, financial crises and war : impact on the art sector -- How the super-rich...

Economic Disruption and the Monetisation of French Collections -- Samuel Courtauld as Private Collector and Public Donor -- Albert Barnes as Currency Opportunist and 'Visionary Art Educator' -- Kojiro Matsukata and the Economics of Rodin in Japan -- Institutional Inertia and the National Gallery...

With the objective of evaluating the accuracy of price index models, we adopt a series of techniques to compares the performances of the hedonic, repeat sales, and hybrid models based on the data from the Chinese most representative painter, Qi Baishi during the period from 2000 to 2016. When...

This book explores what happens to socially committed performance when state systems of social security are dismantled. Since 2010, a punishing programme of economic austerity and a seismic overhaul of the Welfare State in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by an ideological assault on...

This paper shows the importance of correcting for sample selection when investing in illiquid assets that trade endogenously. Using a sample of 32,928 paintings that sold repeatedly between 1960 and 2013, we find an asymmetric V-shaped relation between sale probabilities and returns. Adjusting...

We emphasize that color composition is an important characteristic of a painting. It impacts the auction price of a painting but it has never been considered in previous studies on art markets. By using Picasso's paintings and paintings of Color Field Abstract Expressionists sold in Chrisite's...

We analyze the evolution of the price of paintings in London auctions with a unique dataset of over 200,000 sales in the period 1780-1840. We build a price index for the representative painting through hedonic regressions controlling for the characteristics of auctions and paintings and for the...

This chapter analyzes the risk and return characteristics of investments in artists from the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region over the sample period 2000 to 2012. With hedonic regression modeling we create an annual index that is based on 3,544 paintings created by 663 MENA artists....

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...