Age-Price Profiles for Canadian Painters at Auction
26 Pages Posted: 31 Jan 2011
Date Written: January 31, 2011
Abstract
We conduct an empirical analysis of the effect on the auction price of a Canadian painting of the age of the painter at the time of creation of the painting. We consider several hundred artists, active over the entire history of Canadian art, who are pooled in the estimation of a hedonic regression in which a polynomial function in age enters as a regressor along with several other control variables. We then consider the possibility that the age-price relationship has changed over time by: (a) estimating separate age-price functions for three generational groups of artists - those born before 1880, between 1880 and 1920, and after 1920 and thus coming of age in the world of post-war "contemporary art;" and (b) estimating a parameterization where the shape of the age-price profile is permitted to change continuously depending on the year of birth of the artist. Our principal result is that artists born more recently tend to "peak" earlier in their careers than those of previous generations. As pertaining to artists born after 1920, this result is consistent with the findings of Galenson (2000) for modern American painters, but we find that the phenemenon applies over longer periods of art history.
Keywords: Auction, Age-price profiles, Canadian painting, hedonic regression
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces
By Jianping Mei and Michael Moses
-
Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces
By Jiangping Mei and Michael Moses
-
How Did Japanese Investments Influence International Art Prices?
By Takato Hiraki, Akitoshi Ito, ...
-
Asset Pricing Theory and the Valuation of Canadian Paintings
By Douglas J. Hodgson and Keith Vorkink
-
The Careers of Modern Artists: Evidence from Auctions of Contemporary Paintings
-
Testing for Reference Dependence: An Application to the Art Market
By Alan Beggs and Kathryn Graddy
-
The Collateral Value of Fine Art
By Rex Thompson and Clare Mcandrew
-
The Auction Market for Modern Prints: Confirmations, Contradictions, and New Puzzles