The Economics of Latin American Art: Creativity Patterns and Rates of Return

Sebastian Edwards

No 10302, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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 creativity suggests that Latin American artists have followed very different patterns from that followed by U.S. artists. There is strong evidence suggesting that American artists born after 1920 did their best work at an earlier age than their older colleagues; exactly the opposite is true for the case of Latin America. Indeed, the results reported in this paper suggest that Latin American artists born after 1920 did their best work at a significantly older age than their colleagues from earlier cohorts. The analysis of art as an investment is based on the estimation of hedonic price indexes, and indicates that Latin American art has had a relatively high rate of return indeed much higher than that of other type of paintings. The results also indicate that returns on Latin American art have a very low degree of correlation that is, a very low beta relative to an international portfolio comprised of equities. This means that adding Latin American art will lower the overall risk of an international portfolio.

JEL-codes: J24 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul and nep-lam
Note: AP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Published as Edwards, Sebastian. “The Economics of Latin American Art: Creativity Patterns and Rates of Return.” Economia 4, 2 (Spring 2004): 1-35.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10302.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:nbr:nberwo:10302

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10302

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().