Art is often used as an investment vehicle. Given the importance of market efficiency in finance, we use a large auction-based index to test whether the art market is weakly efficient. Evidence reveals that returns on artworks exhibit high positive auto-correlation. We attribute this result to...

For gold, moving from clandestine to official trading does not significantly change informational efficiency. Both markets are inefficient suggesting that efficiency is linked more to the type of asset than to the legal status of the market.

This paper shows that before (after) fakes’ discoveries, artworks are less (more) likely to be sold through Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Prices only react negatively with a lag, suggesting that sellers try to postpone their sales as long as possible.