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Financial returns to collecting rare political economy books

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  • Ursprung, Heinrich W.

Abstract

Rare books of political economy are eminently collectable. Using historical prices, I employ hedonic regressions to estimate financial returns to collecting the works of ten eminent political economists and develop a price index for this corpus of collectables. For the observation period 1975–2019, I find that in those 45 years investing in rare political economy books yielded an average annual real rate of return of 2.8%, which is well in line with the returns to collecting rare books of classical literature. Compared with other collectibles such as fine art, investing in rare books turns out to be financially more profitable.

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  • Ursprung, Heinrich W., 2021. "Financial returns to collecting rare political economy books," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:poleco:v:70:y:2021:i:c:s0176268021001142
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2021.102139
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    Cited by:

    1. Hefeker Carsten & Potrafke Niklas, 2021. "Heinrich W. Ursprung – Herausragender Ökonom, Mentor und Ratgeber," Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik, De Gruyter, vol. 22(4), pages 370-374, November.
    2. Arye L. Hillman, 2021. "Heinrich Ursprung: a scholarly life," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 189(3), pages 305-312, December.
    3. Łukasz Zakonnik & Piotr Czerwonka & Grzegorz Podgórski & Karolina Zajdel & Radosław Zajdel, 2022. "Art Market Investment Bubble during COVID-19—Case Study of the Rare Books Market in Poland," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(18), pages 1-20, September.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Rare books; Political economy; Price indices; Collectibles; Cultural economics; History of economic thought;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • Z11 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economics of the Arts and Literature

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