Aggregate art price patterns mask a lot of underlying variation--both in the time series and in the cross- section. We argue that, to increase our understanding of the market for aesthetics, it is helpful to take a micro perspective on the formation of art prices, and acknowledge that each...

Scholars of literature have devoted considerable attention to what they have called confessional or personal poetry, in which Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and a series of other poets, from the 1950s on, made their art out of the experiences of their own lives. Yet art scholars have not analyzed...

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by culture....

In this paper I use a large data set to analyze two aspects of the Latin American arts: (1) the nature of artistic creative process, and (2) Latin American art as an investment. I use data on auctions to understand the relation between artists' age and the value of their work. The analysis on...

A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art produces the startling finding that art scholars consider Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to be the most important individual work made by an American artist during the past 150 years. More generally, quantifying the evidence of the...

Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes...

There have been two very different life cycles for great modern artists: some have made their major contributions early in their careers, while others have produced their best work later in their lives. These patterns have been associated with different artistic goals and working methods:...

There have been two very different life cycles for important modern artists: some, including Picasso, have made their greatest contributions early in their careers, whereas others, like C‚zanne, have produced their best work late in their lives. Art's young geniuses have worked deductively to...

Advances in communication technologies over the past half century have made the cultural goods of one country more readily available to consumers in another, raising concerns that cultural products from large economies - in particular the US - will displace the indigenous cultural products of...

This paper considers economic issues and trends in the rock and roll industry, broadly defined. The analysis focuses on concert revenues, the main source of performers ' income. Issues considered include: price measurement; concert price acceleration in the 1990s; the increased concentration of...