【讲座时间】2023年6月6日  14:00

【讲座地点】BV韦德108室

【讲座主题】Art in Times of Crisis

【嘉宾介绍】李越欣，中国人民大学应用经济学助理教授

她于2021年在荷兰蒂尔堡大学获得金融学博士学位。研究领域包括文化经济、艺术品金融、经济历史和公司金融。目前研究主要关注艺术品拍卖市场的定价机制、艺术家职业生涯与创造力、艺术流派变迁史。研究成果发表于《金融研究》、Management Science等

【内容提要】

Is art a safe haven in times of political or financial crisis? We trace the long-term performance of the UK art market during world wars, economic recessions, financial crises, inflationary periods, and changes in monetary policy. We digitalized historical auction archives to construct art price indices from the early 20 th century onwards. Annual art auction value grew, in real terms, more than seven-fold over the past century. The arithmetic annual real return and risk amount to 3.6% and 20.1%, respectively.

Art returns plummeted at the onset of wars, but in the later years of war periods, returns became positive and outperformed equities, which suggests that art could serve as a hedge against political uncertainty. During wars, smaller and thus transportable paintings obtained higher returns.

Art is sensitive to economic and financial crises, with the largest slumps occurring in the Post-WWI recession, the Great Depression, the oil crisis, the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s, and the Great Recession. By far the largest declines in art returns occurred in 1931 (-63%) and for the postWWII period in 1991 (-37%) when the largest art market bubble in art history burst. We highlight changes in art preferences for specific paintings by size, art school, art objects’ liquidity, and artists’ nationalities during different crises. We report that art enters a broad optimal asset portfolio both in noncrisis periods and during war times which implies that it is a safe haven during political crises, but not during financial crisis and economic recessions.