The art market has seen boom and bust during the last years and, despite the downturn, has received more attention from investors given the low interest environment following the financial crisis. However, participation has been reserved for a few investors and the hedging of exposures remains...

Situation at financial markets tend investors to look for alternative investments to diversify their portfolio. The aim of our research is evaluation of hedonic price index for selected Polish painters based on data from auctions of paintings held by auction houses and foundations in the years...

We examine the impact of aging on wine prices and the performance of wine as a long-term investment, using a unique historical database for five long-established Bordeaux wines that we construct from auction and dealer prices. We estimate the life-cycle price patterns with a regression model...

Collectible postage stamp prices in the Netherlands witnessed a bubble in the late 1970’s, while prices rapidly floored in the mid 1980’s. We analyze 500 individual stamps prices (instead of a single index) to examine if the bubble could somehow have been predicted and whether there were...

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 Jensen’s alpha is defined in the CAPM framework, its uncritical application as a measure of the psychic return may be...

I report historical prices and estimate financial returns to investing in rare books. My sample consists of 25 fiction titles recommended by Clifton Fadiman in his 1960 Lifetime Reading Plan. Relying on prices realized at American and British auction houses between 1975 and 2018, I use hedonic...

A five cent $0.05 investment in Bitcoin on July 17, 2010, the first date in which there appears to have been a published value had grown to $7,383.39 on July 18, 2018. While Bitcoin as a currency has existed for less than a decade ̶ it had a very limited liquidity and usage during the first few...

I develop a model of collectibles tokenization to understand whether recent tokenization efforts create or destroy value. While issuing divisible security tokens against illiquid collectibles lowers transaction costs and facilitates greater portfolio diversification, security design...

In this paper, we document the historical performance of collectable coins from 1967 to 2015. Collectable coins have a 9.7% annualized nominal return and a 5.5% real return over this period. We show collectable coins provide large diversification benefits based on their Sharpe ratios and are...

This paper contains a new review of the research of the last decade that has been designed to shed light on how the art auction system works, what it indicates about price formation, and how well it performs. We begin with a short description of the mechanics of the auction system and then...