The Labor Market in the Art Sector of Baroque Rome

Entry of Painters in the Amsterdam Market of the Golden Age

“…34 This could suggest that, after taking into account quantitative aspects of the paintings and unobservable quality of the painters, most of the price differentials between genres were negligible. This is in line with what found in the primary market for paintings during the same century in Rome by Etro et al (2015). Here, however, we are looking at a secondary market, where price differentials between genres due to changes in preferences could persist even if they were absent in the primary market: more precisely, price differentials in the secondary market could induce adjustments in the production of different genres in the primary market, but this would lead to price convergence only gradually in the secondary market.…”

The Economics of Renaissance Art

“…Interestingly, painters are paid substantially less for frescoes even after controlling for size and number of figures, which is probably due to the faster production technique, leaving less space for incentives to exert effort and more to pure talent. These results are in line with results on primary commissions in the Venetian Republic between 1550 and 1750 and in Rome during the 1600s (see Etro and Pagani 2013; Etro, Marchesi, and Pagani 2015).…”

The Market for Paintings in Paris between Rococo and Romanticism

“…In the following analysis we will mainly analyze hedonic regressions that relate the log of the price of paintings to a number of explanatory variables and time dummies. An advantage of our empirical analysis compared to previous investigations on historical markets (Etro and Pagani, , ; Etro et al., ) is that we are able to control not only for fundamental characteristics such as size, support, originality of the work, attribution to a school and a painter and so on, but also for the characteristics of the transaction that vary from auction to auction: the lot number, the length of the catalogue description, the average price of the other paintings sold in the auction, the characteristics of the dealers organizing the sale and buying the lots and the associated network structure. To some extent, our information is even more complete than what is usually available for modern auctions: indeed, the identity of the buyer is typically secret in modern auctions, which makes it impossible to analyze networks of buyers and collusive practices between auction organizers and buyers.…”

“…Recent research in cultural economics has investigated the organization of historical art markets and the economic behavior of its players, both in the case of primary markets (see De Marchi and Van Miegroet, ; Etro and Pagani, , ; Etro et al., ) and secondary markets, especially auctions of paintings (see Montias, ; De Marchi and Van Miegroet, , ) . In this work we analyze the organization of auctions in Paris between the mid‐XVIII century and the first half of the XIX century through a unique dataset and we examine the determinants of art prices and bidding strategies in that period.…”