Intellectual property rights have changed the market value and direction of artistic innovation throughout art history, in particular when new creations built on the art of predecessors. In this paper, we test how changes in legal frameworks and litigation risks affected market value and commercial trade around artistic reuses in the figurative arts and the 'Appropriation Art' movement in particular. Appropriation artists borrow images from different sources and incorporate them into new, derivative works of art. By doing so, they risk infringing copyright but also put auction trade and artwork availability at litigation risk as liability can extend to market intermediaries, such as auction houses, museums, or galleries. Using a differences-in-differences model and large-scale online data, we investigate the causal impact of the prominent \textit{Cariou v. Prince} U.S. higher court decision on intermediary trade and the availability of artworks on sale in the Appropriation Art. As an exogenous shock, this decision changed the perceived litigation risk for market intermediaries around what constitutes fair use. Following the court decision, we find a temporary decline in the total number of global auctions in the Appropriation Art, a lower sales probability of these artworks, and a relocation of related auctions to non-U.S. houses. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-023-09470-1

This article summarizes standard film financing practices for the production and distribution of new content over the past 30 years using a mixed-methods approach. It takes the U.S. movie industry as a case in point to study how excess risk and uncertainty in the financing of new projects are processed and managed by private-sector, entities as well as what market-based solutions have been developed to prevent market failure. The research has wide-ranging implications for other creative industries and their use of intangible assets in creative content finance. In particular, it discusses the prominent role of intellectual property rights in financial transactions in the U.S. audiovisual sector and the ability of the industry to leverage funds through the strategic use of its IP assets. The research findings are based on a series of semi-structured interviews, commissioned expert memoranda, and a dedicated panel of selected industry experts. In addition, using novel data from Uniform Commercial Code filings and official IP registers, we conduct exploratory analysis and provide descriptive evidence on the use of credit and intangible collateral as well as the industry diffusion of such practices. In light of the digital transformation of the industry, this research also documents industry trends and recent changes in U.S. film financing and provides an alternative explanation for the surge in new titles. Finally, we outline generic policy options for improving the financing environment for new films in the United States. The results could help to inform the larger debate on IP-backed finance and the strategic use of intangible assets in content industries.

This article examines how an artist’s death influences exhibition activity and auction prices, providing new insights into artistic legacy and postmortem market dynamics in the visual arts. Using a panel dataset of exhibition histories and auction transactions for a sample of prominent artists born after the twentieth century, we employ regression discontinuity and event-study designs to identify causal effects. We find that an artist’s death leads to a significant temporary decline in exhibitions, which we attribute to increased transaction frictions, including search costs and legacy management challenges. In contrast, a significant postmortem price premium emerges in auction markets, consistent with idea of scarcity and finite supply. The magnitude of this premium varies substantially by legacy artist characteristics: young, low-reputation artists experience the highest price increases, suggesting buyers anticipate future appreciation in reputation. These findings contribute to the empirical literature on auction pricing, reputation effects, and transaction costs in cultural markets, offering broader implications for asset markets where supply constraints and information asymmetries shape long-term valuation.

Publicity rights, which exist in the U.S. as individual state laws, can provide a degree of control over the name, image, and likeness (NIL) of celebrities, both living and deceased. These rights have evolved into significant commercial assets, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence and the rise of digital replica uses. Even though these rights have received substantial media and legislative attention over the past few years in the U.S., they have so far escaped the attention of economists. This article seeks to remedy that with the first empirical examination of publicity rights, exploring whether they provide potentially welfare-improving economic incentives and how they interact with other types of intellectual property rights (IPRs). We exploit asynchronous changes in U.S. state laws regarding the application of publicity rights combined with a battery of outcome variables from various sources to examine the causal relationship between publicity rights and celebrity popularity, related commercial activities online, copyright reliance, and trademark reliance. We find that, upon the loss of publicity rights, celebrities become less popular and engage in less commercial activities related to their NILs. We also find that rightsholders become significantly more reliant on copyright and trademark protection when they lose publicity rights, despite minimal direct overlap in the coverage of those IPRs, indicating rightsholders are able to indirectly appropriate the value of their NILs through alternative protections. Moreover, our findings imply that protection of NILs (which is a restriction on competition) can be welfare improving. 

We provide quantitative evidence from museum collections about how copyright status affects the availability of digital images of artworks. The paper applies a regression discontinuity and differences-in-differences design to estimate online availability of artworks from U.S. collections on digital-platforms. We find a strong increase in the availability of digital surrogates when copyright is perceived to expire and original artworks are likely to transition to the public domain. Moreover, artworks and surrogates made available see a large number of downstream reuses based on google image search data, which indicates online availability is of commercial and public value independent of right status. Notably, we show that upstream surrogates of public domain artworks made available by museums are positively correlated with higher image resolution quality as compared to digitized artworks still protected under copyright laws. At the same time, it seems expressed industry norms can help encourage U.S. museums to also make low-resolution surrogates of copyrighted artworks available.

This paper studies the death effect on artists' exhibitions and commercial success in the secondary art market. Based on a random sample of 1'000 popular artists born after the turn of the 20th century, we construct a novel panel data set of their worldwide exhibition history and auction transactions. By applying a regression discontinuity and event-study design, we find an overall negative effect of artist death on exhibition outcomes. However, this post-mortem effect disappears in longer term. Roughly ten years after death, exhibitions are back to pre-death levels. Arguably, transaction cost and higher auction prices after death also temporarily increase the average cost of exhibiting artworks, e.g. higher market valuation raises (unobserved) insurance cost for exhibitions. Hedonic auction price models confirm this intuition and suggest a significant price premium posthumously. We find substantial heterogeneity in the treatment depending on the age and reputation of the artist at death. Overall findings explain important mechanisms for the post mortem value of artistic work and have policy implications for the creative sectors, cultural preservation and legacy stewardship.

E-books have revolutionized the book market with significant environmental consequences. Several life cycle assessments (LCAs) have compared the per-unit greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts of reading paper books and e-books. However, they do not determine the net GHG impacts of digitalization, which also depend on changes in quantities produced and consumed in both formats. This article evaluates whether the digitalization of the book market has increased or decreased its GHG impact by examining (1) LCA studies of paper books versus e-books and (2) mechanisms through which digitalization affects book supply and demand based on economic literature. LCA studies show that e-books likely reduce GHG emissions for heavy readers, while paper books can be more climate-friendly when widely shared or when e-books are read on energy-intensive devices. On the demand side, digitalization influences book consumption by replacing physical formats, improving access and discoverability, offering auxiliary information, enabling new pricing models, and shaping broader media and lifestyle trends. On the supply side, it reduces production costs, accelerates publication cycles, facilitates content reuse, affects quality, and expands distribution via self-publishing and direct sales. Through a quantitative GHG assessment, we show that substitution of paper books with e-books can reduce emissions—but only if digitalization significantly reduces paper book consumption. If e-books complement rather than replace paper books, total emissions may increase. We conclude that the assumption that e-books replace paper books is overly simplistic. Digitalization stimulates both supply and demand, and integrating environmental and economic perspectives is essential to assess its net sustainability impact.

This paper assesses the impact of the pandemic crisis on self-employed income among artists resident in Germany. Using unique data from the latest available public insurance records, we show that musicians and performing artists are among the most vulnerable groups, and that writers, on average, are relatively less impacted. Moreover, the paper looks at the impact of the 2020 crisis on income differences by gender, career stages and regions, and it investigates the effect of specific non-pharmaceutical, public intervention implemented in German states.

Cuntz, A and M Sahli (eds), Resilience and Ingenuity: Global Innovation Responses to Covid-19, CEPR Press, London. https://cepr.org/chapters/covid-19-impact-artistic-income-evidence-germany