Financial Returns to Collecting Rare Political Economy Books

Heinrich Ursprung

No 8910, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Rare books of political economy are eminently collectable. Using historical prices, I employ hedonic regressions to estimate financial returns to collecting the works of ten eminent political economists and develop a price index for this corpus of collectables. For the observation period 1975-2019, I find that in those 45 years investing in rare political economy books yielded an average annual real rate of return of 2.8%, which is well in line with the returns to collecting rare books of classical literature. Compared with other collectibles such as fine art, investing in rare books turns out to be financially more profitable.

Keywords: rare books; political economy; price indices; collectibles; cultural economics; history of economic thought (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G11 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8910.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Financial returns to collecting rare political economy books (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8910

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().