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THE LABOR MARKET IN THE ART SECTOR OF BAROQUE ROME
Author(s) -
Etro Federico,
Marchesi Silvia,
Pagani Laura
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
economic inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.823
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1465-7295
pISSN - 0095-2583
DOI - 10.1111/ecin.12115
Subject(s) - painting , unobservable , baroque , wage , economics , incentive , art market , point (geometry) , quality (philosophy) , portrait , hierarchy , margin (machine learning) , art , labour economics , visual arts , microeconomics , market economy , computer science , econometrics , epistemology , machine learning , philosophy , geometry , mathematics
We analyze the labor market for painters in Baroque Rome using unique data on primary sales of portraits, still lifes, genre paintings, landscapes, and figurative paintings. In line with the traditional artistic hierarchy of genres, average price differentials between them were high. The matched painter‐patron nature of the dataset allows us to evaluate the extent to which price heterogeneity is related to unobservable characteristics of painters and patrons. We find that the market allocated artists between artistic genres to the point of equalizing the marginal return of each genre. Residual price differences at the employer level can be explained in terms of incentive mechanisms to induce effort in the production of artistic quality and compensating wage differentials . ( JEL C23, D8, J3, Z11)