THE LABOR MARKET IN THE ART SECTOR OF BAROQUE ROME

Federico Etro (), Silvia Marchesi and Laura Pagani

Economic Inquiry, 2015, vol. 53, issue 1, 365-387

Abstract: We analyze the labor market for painters in Baroque Rome using unique data on primary sales of portraits, still lifes, genre paintings, landscapes, and figurative paintings. In line with the traditional artistic hierarchy of genres, average price differentials between them were high. The matched painter‐patron nature of the dataset allows us to evaluate the extent to which price heterogeneity is related to unobservable characteristics of painters and patrons. We find that the market allocated artists between artistic genres to the point of equalizing the marginal return of each genre. Residual price differences at the employer level can be explained in terms of incentive mechanisms to induce effort in the production of artistic quality and compensating wage differentials. (JEL C23, D8, J3, Z11)

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.12115

Related works:
Working Paper: The Labor Market in the Art Sector of Baroque Rome (2013)
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:bla:ecinqu:v:53:y:2015:i:1:p:365-387

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://ordering.onl ... s.aspx?ref=1465-7295

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Inquiry is currently edited by Tim Salmon

More articles in Economic Inquiry from Western Economic Association International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().