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I am on the Job Market 2025/2026
What is the value of information in the art market?
What's the role of credibility in expert-mediated markets?
This paper provides causal evidence on how the credibility of expert information affects price formation and market efficiency. I adapt a signalling model to the art market, in which privately informed intermediaries decide whether to verify authorship, and low credibility causes attributions to lose informational value, resulting in a pooled ``lemons'' equilibrium. I use an unforeseen legal change in 1836 Britain that introduced liability for false claims about authorship, exogenously increasing the credibility of attributions. After the reform, works attributed to a named artist sold for about 60 percent higher prices, and the probability of sale rose by 30 percent, consistent with a shift to a separating equilibrium. The findings show that credibility is essential for information to translate into efficient pricing and market segmentation.
Painted Lemons Poster.pdfEHS_Luisa.pdfWhat does a value investing strategy look like in the art market?
Without an endowed collection, how did the National Gallery acquire its collection?
This paper examines how an institutional investor pursued a value-investing strategy in a highly illiquid and opaque environment—the nineteenth-century British art market. I assemble a new dataset covering roughly 3,000 acquisitions by the National Gallery in London, combining archival purchase records, insurance-based valuations, and detailed provenance information. I find that the Gallery purchased around 85 percent of its artworks below fair-market value, systematically exploiting market mispricing. These undervalued acquisitions subsequently generated higher long-term returns than artworks donated to the museum. At the portfolio level, the National Gallery’s collection significantly outperformed the broader British art market throughout the twentieth century.
Indian Equity Returns since 1900 (with David Chambers, Maanik Nath and Elias Ohneberg) (Submitted)
Indian Equity Returns since 1900 (with David Chambers, Maanik Nath and Elias Ohneberg) (Submitted)
How do Indian equity returns compare in the long run?
How have returns changed over the 20th century?
Based on listed Indian company data starting in 1909, we find no increase in overall stock market importance until the 1980s. We estimate a new annual series of Indian equity returns from 1900 to 1959. Equities generated a positive real return and risk
premium over the risk-free asset. Viewed over the very long run, the unprecedented market rerating led to a surge in equity performance after 1991 following liberalization. An investor able to access listed Indian equities in London, as well as
Bombay in the colonial period would have seen similar performance and would have benefited from investing in both markets.
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