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Art Auctions and Art Investment in the Golden Age of British Painting

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  • Federico Etro
  • Elena Stepanova

Abstract

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 artists' fixed effects. The emergence of an efficient secondary art market was an important opportunity for portfolio diversification. Estimating a CAPM model for art investment suggests that British paintings could deliver a higher return compared to imported paintings and an attractive source of diversification relative to the contemporary stock market. This contributed to increase demand for British art and, possibly, to promote the innovations of its Golden Age. While the representative painting of the British school was initially undervalued, new British painters reached foreign prices by the beginning of 1800s.

Suggested Citation

  • Federico Etro & Elena Stepanova, 2016. "Art Auctions and Art Investment in the Golden Age of British Painting," LEM Papers Series 2016/34, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    • Handle: RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2016/34
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    Cited by:

    1. Etro, Federico & Marchesi, Silvia & Stepanova, Elena, 2020. "Liberalizing art. Evidence on the Impressionists at the end of the Paris Salon," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    2. Edward Oczkowski, 2021. "The catalogue raisonné and art auction prices: the case of Berthe Morisot," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 61(3), pages 1669-1687, September.
    3. Federico Etro & Elena Stepanova, 2018. "Power-Laws in Art. From Renaissance to Contemporary Art," Working Papers - Economics wp2018_20.rdf, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa.
    4. Etro, Federico & Stepanova, Elena, 2021. "Art return rates from old master paintings to contemporary art," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 181(C), pages 94-116.
    5. Etro, Federico, 2018. "The Economics of Renaissance Art," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 78(2), pages 500-538, June.

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    Keywords

    Art investment; Price of paintings; British Golden Age; Hedonic regressions; CAPM;
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