Kim Oosterlinck

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at Université Libre de Bruxelles

We trace the long‐term performance of the UK art market across a broad set of crises: world wars, economic recessions, financial crises, inflationary periods, and changes in monetary policy. By means of digitalized historical auction archives, we construct art price indices from the early twentieth century onwards and disclose that annual art aucti...

Are copies always inferior to originals in value? In this paper, we first detail the differences existing between copies in the Western and the Eastern worlds and the influence of these differences on their appreciation. In the Western world, copies are often unnamed. By contrast, in China, artists are used to adding seals and inscriptions to decla...

This paper explores how selective default expectations affect the pricing of sovereign bonds in a historical laboratory: the German default of the 1930s. We analyze yield differentials between identical government bonds traded across various creditor countries before and after bond market segmentation. We show that, when secondary debt markets are...

Evidence from the 2022 Ukraine war suggests that, for diversification purposes, gold and bitcoin are complements rather than substitutes during crises. Precisely, this paper shows that (i) gold is a diversifier for European stocks, oil and T-Bills, and a hedge for US stocks, while Bitcoin is a diversifier for all the assets, and (ii) since the outb...

From the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the Paris Salon was the leading visual arts exhibition venue in France—and arguably in all of Europe. For an artist, having a painting admitted to the Salon was a good signal; obtaining one of the competitive medals systematically awarded at the exhibition often marked the start of a successful...

The literature has pointed out the negative aspects of political dynasties. But can political dynasties help prevent autocratic reversals? We argue that political dynasties differ according to their ideological origin and that those whose founder was a defender of democratic ideals, for simplicity labeled “pro-democratic dynasties,” show stronger s...

This article investigates the role of regulation and reputation in the art trade. We look at attribution issues in the auction market, and in France in particular, where both regulatory and reputational mechanisms have been implemented. More specifically, we focus on the Marcus Decree—a pioneering decree that regulates the authentication process of...

This paper investigates quantitatively the evolution of the German art market between 1937 and 1944. During the war, the boom observed in occupied countries offers a sharp contrast with the price evolution in the United Kingdom. Did the German art market show more similarities with the countries it was occupying or was its evolution closer to the B...

This article introduces the Haitian Independence Debt of 1825 to the odious debt and sovereign debt literatures. We argue that the legal doctrine of odious debt is surprisingly and perhaps indefensibly narrow, possibly because of historical contingency rather than any underlying logic or principle. The story of the Haitian Independence Debt of 1825...

This essay describes a novel dataset that facilitates the quantitative analysis of eighteenth and nineteenth-century French painting. Based on titles listed in the Paris Salon livrets, the dataset assigns detailed keywords indicating the content for each of the more than 148,000 paintings shown at the Salon—the principal French art exhibition of th...

In theory credit booms, and the crises associated to these booms, should occur more frequently in Fiat monetary regimes than in regimes, such as the Gold Standard, where money creation is constrained. In this note, we investigate whether the importance of the credit boom factor, as an early warning indicator (EWI) of systemic financial crises, vari...

‘Sovereign’ bonds issued by colonies are often supposed to benefit from an implicit imperial guarantee. This guarantee is usually presented as the main reason why yields on colonial bonds are exceptionally low. This paper investigates investors’ perception of this guarantee during the interwar period, a period during which the guarantor faced finan...

Proper inventory management is crucial for art galleries. Yet, despite its importance, inventory management has been overlooked in the literature. We distinguish four main strategies used by art dealers to manage their inventory and use this classification to set the inventory strategy of Goupil, Boussod & Valadon, a major art gallery active in Fra...

When a conflict breaks out, warring states’ bond prices generally experience sharp declines. As military defeat may prompt the winner to ask for reparations, bonds issued by the losing party are usually even more affected. By contrast, during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the prices of the bonds issued by the South African Republic never f...

Economists have suggested it was optimal to signal the odious character of bonds when they were issued. However, since the odious debt doctrine has not been recognized by any court, one could argue that denouncing odious debts is useless. Exploiting a unique historical episode, this paper quantifies the impact of protests on odious debts. In 1906,...

The value of a painting is influenced above all by the artist who created it and his reputation. Painters nowadays are easy to identify and are used to signing their artworks. But what about those whose names have not survived the test of time? This paper contributes to the understanding of art valuation and art brands on the auction market. It foc...

In 1898, in the wake of the Spanish-American war, Spain ceded the colony of Cuba to the United States. In keeping with the law of state succession, the Spanish demanded that the U.S. also take on Spanish debts that had been backed by Cuban revenues. The Americans refused, arguing that some of those debts had been utilized for purposes adverse to th...

Sovereign debt crises are not a new phenomenon. Thus, history offers useful insights into the complex nature of sovereign debts and ways of addressing debt crises. This chapter explores sovereign debt problems and the responses to such problems in historical perspective. The chapter discusses historical episodes of sovereign debt defaults, how such...

Despite its importance as a financial centre, the historical literature dedicated to the Swiss financial industry remains scarce. Analyses focusing on cantons and cities of the country are even more limited in number. This is unfortunate and is, in all likelihood, linked to the reluctance of financial institutions to share information in a country...

Because of data scarcity, there are few quantitative analyses dealing with clandestine markets, despite their prime importance during wartime. This paper exploits a unique database of daily prices of gold coins traded in occupied Paris in order to gain insights into the price formation on such a market. First, using data from Switzerland, we show t...

According to the syndicated loan pricing puzzle (Carey and Nini, 2007) interest rates charged to corporate borrowers are lower in Europe than in the U.S. Our investigation suggests that controlling for region-specific credit ratings makes the Europe–U.S. gap insignificant, and solves the puzzle. We speculate that the puzzle originates from the lack...

Belle Époque Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom. Exploiting a new granular trade dataset, we find that the number of products delivered abroad and destinations serviced more than doubled in less than 40 years. To explain this remarkable achievement, we study the relationship between trade costs and the intensive and extensive margins of t...

This paper analyses the boom on the Dutch art market during World War II. It relies on an original database covering all pictures - over 11,000 - sold at Mak van Waay, one of the two premier Dutch auction houses during the occupation. Hedonic regressions show that in real terms, the price of paintings increased more than fivefold between 1940 and 1...

Because of data scarcity, and despite their importance during wartime, there are almost no quantitative analyses of black markets. This paper exploits a unique database of daily prices of gold coins traded in occupied Paris to get insights on the price formation on such a market. Even though the market was illegal, it was tolerated by the occupying...

This article compares the performance of various diversification strategies regarding foreign exchange reserves. The aim is to provide central banks with guidelines in portfolio allocation. We pay particular attention to the situation of upward pressures on US interest rates by implementing our analysis over both the whole 1986-2015 period and a ri...

During World War II, artworks significantly outperformed all alternative investments in Occupied France. With the surge in demand for portable and easy-to-hide (discreet) assets such as artworks and collectible stamps, prices boomed. This suggests that discreet assets may be viewed as crypto-currencies, demand for which varies depending on the envi...

This chapter first reviews the literature suggesting that reputational concerns may prompt sovereigns to honour their debts. It then shows that Russia benefited from a good reputation before the repudiation. The chapter then proceeds to analyse the motivations underlying the decision to repudiate the debts and the role played by the various bondhol...

These days the pricing of a bond seems unrelated to the nationality of its holder. In other words, the financial markets do not seem to put a different value on a bond according to the nationality of the person holding it.¹ However, the Russian repudiation offers a historical counterexample. In the 1920s the British Union of Russian Bondholders ind...

This chapter first reviews the literature suggesting that military intervention or the threat to actually use gunboat diplomacy may prompt sovereigns to honour their debts. Military threat and not just actual intervention had in the past a real impact on how markets valued the likelihood of default. In the Russian case, the situation was extremely...

The first chapters of the book identified all the potential reasons Russian bond prices remained resilient despite the formal announcement of their repudiation. The purpose of this chapter is to determine the relative importance of each of these factors from a quantitative perspective. In a first phase the analysis determines the dates on which mar...

The first chapter details the nature of sovereign debts. The sovereign nature of the issuer has an enormous impact in terms of risk. At the very least, one may argue that sovereign bonds have a split personality in terms of risk. Indeed, debt issued by a government can be considered as either the safest financial asset or one of the riskiest. This...

Long before the Russian bonds were repudiated, the redrawing of territorial boundaries as a result of wars, annexations, and inheritances had raised the issue of the debt of territories that had either become independent or been incorporated into new nations. This issue was central in the case of the Russian bonds because the Russian revolution led...

This chapter details the reasons which prompted French investors to believe that France might bail them out. During the 19th century the French government had bailed out its citizens who had invested in the Mexican bonds the French government had promoted. In the Russian case the French government was even more involved. While legally the French go...

This is a book about hope and international finance. The repudiation of Russia’s debt by the Bolsheviks in 1918 affected French investors for several generations. The reason for this was the sheer volume of money lent by institutional investors and private citizens alike. This book focuses on the reasons which prompted French investors to hope they...

During World War II, Germany occupied much of continental Europe. Although the social and political history of this occupation has been studied extensively, the economics of the unprecedented transfer of resources has received surprisingly little attention. Allies, neutrals, and conquered nations under German hegemony were a vital source of supplie...

In 1918, the Soviet revolutionary government repudiated the Tsarist regime’s sovereign debt, triggering one of the biggest sovereign defaults ever. Yet the price of Russian bonds remained high for years. Combing French archival records, Kim Oosterlinck shows that, far from irrational, investors had legitimate reasons to hope for repayment. Soviet d...

Bitcoin (BTC) is a major virtual currency. Using weekly data over the 2010–2013 period, we analyze a BTC investment from the standpoint of a US investor with a diversified portfolio including both traditional assets (worldwide stocks, bonds, hard currencies) and alternative investments (commodities, hedge funds, real estate). Over the period under...

To investigate the link between monetary reforms and prices on the art market, this article focuses on the aftermath of the Gutt plan, a monetary purge implemented in Belgium just after World War II. On the basis of an original database of close on 3,000 artworks sold between 1945 and 1951, this article shows that, following the implementation of t...

We develop a method to estimate which side will win a civil war using data from international financial markets. The key insight we deliver is that, for typical sovereign debt contracts, the probability of debt repayment will equal the probability of victory in a civil war. We test our predictor for standard outcomes in civil wars, including when t...

This paper analyses the boom on the wartime Dutch art market, using a new art price index based on hedonic regressions. A detailed database covering all pictures – over 11.000 – sold at Mak van Waay (one of the two premier Dutch auction houses) allows the use of a model with a number of innovative aspects with regards to both the authenticity and t...

Economists have been blamed for their inability to forecast and address crises. This article attributes this inability to intertwined factors: the lack of a coherent definition of crises, the reference-class problem, the lack of imagination regarding the nature of future crises and sample-selection biases. Specifically, economists tend to adapt the...

Even though more and more research on the art market has been conducted in the last years, the interaction between scholars from different disciplines remains limited. The book edited by Anna Dempster overcomes this often-encountered limitation. Indeed, contributors include scholars active in finance, economics, art history or sociology and also pr...

This study aims to investigate the black market on gold in Paris during the Second World War. Based on documents from the Banque de France and French National archives, we discover that this black market was not so black since it was well known and tolerated by the German army and French police. An original data set of daily prices of three gold co...

Following Waterloo, managing French public finances represented a daunting task as the country had lost a substantial part of its population and territory and had to pay huge amounts as reparations to the victors. Despite this, in just ten years, France managed to issue substantial amounts of debt with a spread, compared to the British consol, fall...

When taken together, art and World War II are often viewed through the lens of restitution of looted artworks. A recent literature has begun analysing the evolution of art markets in occupied countries. For most occupied countries it appears that prices of artworks experienced a boom during the war. This paper takes another approach, and focuses on...

This paper analyses the evolution of the art market in occupied countries during WWII. The three main markets, the French, the Dutch and the Belgian, experienced a similar boom with both artworks prices and the volume of sales reaching exceptional values. The paper suggests that this price boom was due to the German increase in buying due to the al...

History provides many insights to address the issue of sovereign debt defaults. This article first presents a detailed account of defaults in historical perspective. It then discusses the solutions devised in the past to address sovereign debt crises and puts these into perspective with today’s answers when crises occur. Finally, the paper stresses...

Art is often used as an investment vehicle. Given the importance of market efficiency in finance, we use a large auction-based index to test whether the art market is weakly efficient. Evidence reveals that returns on artworks exhibit high positive auto-correlation. We attribute this result to price truncation resulting from unobservable reserve pr...

Paper reviewed, retitled version '"Preise spielen gar keine Rolle". The booming art market in occupied Western Europe, 1940-1945' presented follow-up conference in Hamburg in 2014.

Bitcoin is a major virtual currency. Using weekly data over the 2010-2013 period, we analyze a Bitcoin investment from the standpoint of a U.S. investor with a diversified portfolio including both traditional assets (worldwide stocks, bonds, hard currencies) and alternative investments (commodities, hedge funds, real estate). Bitcoin investment has...

Sovereign debts differ from other financial instruments because repayment ultimately depends on the issuers' willingness to pay. In turn, willingness to pay may be influenced by political, diplomatic or economic considerations. Based on an original database of Romanian bonds traded in Paris, this article shows that international diplomacy played an...

During World War II, the art market experienced a massive boom in occupied countries. The discretion, the inflation proof character, the absence of market intervention and the possibility to resell artworks abroad have been suggested to explain why investing in artworks was one of the most interesting opportunities under the German boot. On basis o...

The market portfolio efficiency remains controversial. This paper develops a new test of portfolio mean-variance efficiency relying on the realistic assumption that all assets are risky. The test is based on the vertical distance of a portfolio from the efficient frontier. Monte Carlo simulations show that our test outperforms the previous mean-var...

This paper shows that before (after) fakes’ discoveries, artworks are less (more) likely to be sold through Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Prices only react negatively with a lag, suggesting that sellers try to postpone their sales as long as possible.

Levy and Roll (Review of Financial Studies, 2010) have recently revived the debate related to the market portfolio's efficiency suggesting that it may be mean-variance efficient after all. This paper develops an alternative test of portfolio mean-variance efficiency based on the realistic assumption that all assets are risky. The test is based on t...

Les entreprises du secteur de l'énergie sous l'Occupation [The Energy Sector during the Occupation]. Edited by DenisVaraschin. Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2006. 447 pp. Illustrations, figures, tables, notes. Paper, €30.00. ISBN: 2-848-32045-1. - Volume 81 Issue 2 - Kim Oosterlinck

The recent turmoil in the financial markets has highlighted that no asset is really free of risk. Indeed, even the supposedly safest assets, namely sovereign bonds issued by developed countries, are exposed to default risk. Despite this observation most mean-variance efficiency tests are designed for universes that include a riskless asset. This pa...

The emergence of the gold standard has for a long time been viewed as inevitable. Fluctuations of the gold-silver exchange rate in world markets were accused to lead to brutal and unsustainable switches of bimetallic countries’ money supplies. However, more recent work has shown that the option character of bimetallism provided a stabilizing feedba...

During World War II, the art market experienced a massive boom in occupied countries. The discretion, the inflation proof character, the absence of market intervention and the possibility to resell artworks abroad have been suggested to explain why investing in artworks was one of the most interesting opportunities under the German boot. On basis o...

Based on archives of the French brokers, the French finance ministry and the occupying forces, this article analyses the motivations of the legal changes imposed on the French exchanges during the war. Most of the measures taken by the Vichy government were meant to stimulate the demand for French state bonds. Three main tools were used to render s...

Reasons why organizations sponsor artistic and cultural events have attracted a lot of scholarly attention. However, understanding why organizations create and develop their own collections has remained largely under investigated. This is especially striking in the financial sector where companies are well-known for owning substantial art collectio...

Exploiting an exceptional historical example, this paper proposes an original method to address the existence of sovereign creditor moral hazard. As the coronas which are observable only during a total eclipse of the sun, market-specific prices of repudiated bonds are observable only when extreme conditions (a war, in this instance) segment the mar...

A forward contract is an agreement between two parties who specify today the terms (price, underlying asset, quantity, etc.) of an exchange that is to take place at a known future date. Forward contracts can be traced to Greek and Roman times, and may have occurred earlier still; they have been widely traded in Europe (and subsequently elsewhere) s...

Sovereign bonds are usually priced under the assumption that only the sovereign issuer may be responsible of their repayment. In some cases however, bondholders may legitimately expect to be repaid by more than one agent. For example, when a country breaks-up, successor states may agree to recognize their responsibility for part of the debt. Other...

Occupation charges paid by France to Nazi Germany represent one of the largest international transfers and contributed significantly to the German war effort. We employ a neoclassical growth model that incorporates essential features of the occupied economy to assess the welfare costs of the policies that managed the payments to Germany. Our lower...

Reparations for damage caused, paid by the loser following wars, have been known since Antiquity, although much of the literature focuses on the First World War. There has been much debate, both politically and among economists, on the appropriate basis on which to pay.

Historians have long wondered whether the Southern Confederacy had a realistic chance at winning the American Civil War. We provide some quantitative evidence on this question by introducing a new methodology for estimating the probability of winning a civil war or revolution based on decisions in financial markets. Using a unique dataset of Confed...

The occupation payments made by France to Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944 represent one of the largest recorded international transfers and contributed significantly to financing the overall German war effort. Using a neoclassical growth model that incorporates essential features of the occupied economy and the postwar stabilization, we assess t...