IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sol/wpaper/2013-176148.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is Art Really a Safe Haven? Evidence from the French Art Market During WWI

Author

Listed:
  • Geraldine David

Abstract

During crisis art is often considered as a safe haven both by the scientific literature and the financial advisors. For example, during WWII art markets encountered a massive boom in occupied countries This paper questions this vision of art as a safe investment providing evidence that art has not always supplied a safe investing way during crisis. To do so it constructs, on basis of an original database of 22,000 entries, an art price index for the French art market during WWI and the postwar period in France (1911-1925). The results show that the WWII boom mostly reflected the specificities of the occupation economy imposed by the Nazis. Indeed during WWI artworks underperformed gold, real-estate, bonds and stocks in terms of risk-return performances. This underperformance can be explained by several peculiarities of the market. Investors tended to prefer cheap artworks and old masters during WWI as these were less volatile at the time.

Suggested Citation

  • Geraldine David, 2014. "Is Art Really a Safe Haven? Evidence from the French Art Market During WWI," Working Papers CEB 14-025, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    • Handle: RePEc:sol:wpaper:2013/176148
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/176148/1/wp14025.pdf
    File Function: wp14025
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Unknown, 1967. "Index," 1967 Conference, August 21-30, 1967, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia 209796, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    2. Kim Oosterlinck, 2009. "The Price of Degenerate Art," Working Papers CEB 09-031.RS, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    3. Ginsburgh, Victor & Jeanfils, Philippe, 1995. "Long-term comovements in international markets for paintings," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 39(3-4), pages 538-548, April.
    4. Luc Renneboog & Christophe Spaenjers, 2013. "Buying Beauty: On Prices and Returns in the Art Market," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(1), pages 36-53, February.
    5. Helen Higgs & Andrew Worthington, 2005. "Financial Returns and Price Determinants in the Australian Art Market, 1973–2003," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 81(253), pages 113-123, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sun, Qinglin & Zhang, Zhiyuan, 2023. "Can art hedge against economic policy uncertainty?: New insights through the NARDL model," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    2. Belma Öztürkkal & Aslı Togan-Eğrican, 2020. "Art investment: hedging or safe haven through financial crises," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 44(3), pages 481-529, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Demir, Ender & Gozgor, Giray & Sari, Emre, 2018. "Dynamics of the Turkish paintings market: A comprehensive empirical study," Emerging Markets Review, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 180-194.
    2. Fedderke, Johannes W. & Chen, Tinghua, 2023. "Generalizing the “Masterpiece Effect” in fine art pricing: Quantile Hedonic regression results for the South African fine art market, 2009–2021," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).
    3. Garay, Urbi & Pérez, Eduardo & Pulga, Fredy, 2022. "Color intensity variations and art prices: An examination of Latin American art," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 147(C), pages 158-176.
    4. Penasse, J.N.G. & Renneboog, L.D.R., 2014. "Bubbles and Trading Frenzies : Evidence from the Art Market," Other publications TiSEM bf0d8984-df7f-4f02-afc7-3, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    5. Assaf, Ata & Kristoufek, Ladislav & Demir, Ender & Kumar Mitra, Subrata, 2021. "Market efficiency in the art markets using a combination of long memory, fractal dimension, and approximate entropy measures," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    6. Marinelli, Nicoletta & Palomba, Giulio, 2011. "A model for pricing Italian Contemporary Art paintings at auction," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 212-224, May.
    7. Bocart, Fabian Y.R.P. & Hafner, Christian M., 2012. "Econometric analysis of volatile art markets," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 56(11), pages 3091-3104.
    8. Garay, Urbi, 2021. "Determinants of art prices and performance by movements: Long-run evidence from an emerging market," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 413-426.
    9. Le Fur, Eric, 2020. "Dynamics of the global fine art market prices," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 167-180.
    10. Shailendra Gurjar & Usha Ananthakumar, 2023. "The economics of art: price determinants and returns on investment in Indian paintings," International Journal of Social Economics, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 50(6), pages 839-859, January.
    11. William N. Goetzmann & Luc Renneboog & Christophe Spaenjers, 2011. "Art and Money," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(3), pages 222-226, May.
    12. Assaf, Ata, 2018. "Testing for bubbles in the art markets: An empirical investigation," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 340-355.
    13. Renneboog, L.D.R. & Spaenjers, C., 2014. "Investment Returns and Economic Fundamentals in International Art Markets," Discussion Paper 2014-018, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
    14. Vecco, Marilena & Zanola, Roberto, 2017. "Don’t let the easy be the enemy of the good. Returns from art investments: What is wrong with it?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 120-129.
    15. Douglas Hodgson & Aylin Seçkin, 2012. "Dynamic price dependence of Canadian and international art markets: an empirical analysis," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 43(2), pages 867-890, October.
    16. Szyszka Adrianna & Białowąs Sylwester, 2019. "Prices of works of art by living and deceased artists auctioned in Poland from 1989 to 2012," Economics and Business Review, Sciendo, vol. 5(4), pages 112-127, December.
    17. Douglas HODGSON & Aylin SECKIN, 2010. "Dynamic Price Dependence of Canadian and World Art Markets: An Empirical Analysis," EcoMod2010 259600074, EcoMod.
    18. Charlin, Ventura & Cifuentes, Arturo, 2013. "A new financial metric for the art market," MPRA Paper 50186, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. David, Geraldine, 2016. "Art as an investment in a historical perspective," Other publications TiSEM 2361da4b-d827-4cae-91ce-1, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    20. Oosterlinck, Kim & David, Géraldine & Huemer, Christian, 2019. "Art Dealers’ Inventory Strategy The case of Goupil, Boussod & Valadon from 1860 to 1914," CEPR Discussion Papers 13941, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Art markets; Art investment; WWI; France; War; Postwar;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N14 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: 1913-
    • N24 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - Europe: 1913-
    • N44 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - Europe: 1913-
    • Z11 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economics of the Arts and Literature

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sol:wpaper:2013/176148. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Benoit Pauwels (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebulbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.