Masters of Masterpieces: Social Mobility and Elites’ Art Ownership Dynamics

Shuo Chen (), Xinyu Fan (), Luc Renneboog () and Yanfei Yin ()
Additional contact information
Shuo Chen: Fudan University
Xinyu Fan: Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business
Luc Renneboog: Tilburg University
Yanfei Yin: University of California at Santa Barbara

No AWP-03-2026, ACEI Working Paper Series from Association for Cultural Economics International

Abstract: Wealth flows of top-notch elites reflect the socioeconomic structural changes of the times. Pareto’s theory of circulation of elites questions whether and how wealth flows from old elites to new ones, from political elites to economic ones, and vice versa. We adopt a novel approach to trace wealth flows of pre-modern social elites by tracking masterpiece artwork ownership dynamics, by means of 42,948 collection stamps on 8,555 masterpiece artworks in historical China (from the 8th century Tang dynasty until the fall of the Qing empire in 1911). The masterpieces tended to flow from higher to lower social classes within the same dynasty, whereas dynastic changes, often re-centralized art ownership to top-notch political elites. Wealthy classes without political power increasingly acquired the masterpiece artworks from those with political power, validating the theory of elite circulation in pre-modern societies from a wealth perspective. Masterpieces increasingly flowed from higher to lower social classes in regions with higher social mobility. The results are robust when controlling for political turmoil, governance instability, and social unrest. We advance our understanding of elite mobility and transition between political and economic elites by creating a new method to evaluate wealth flows in pre-modern societies where modern indicators are not available.

Keywords: Ownership; Social Mobility; Governance; Art Masterpiece; Political Power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 G51 N35 O15 P46 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://files.culturaleconomics.org/papers/AWP-03-2026.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cue:wpaper:awp-03-2026

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ACEI Working Paper Series from Association for Cultural Economics International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Paul Crosby ().