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Australian Fine Art As An Alternative Investment, A. C. Worthington, H. Higgs

Faculty of Business - Accounting & Finance Working Papers

In this study, 35,805 paintings by forty-five leading Australian artists sold at auction over the period 1973-2003 are used to construct individual hedonic price indices. The attributes included in each artist’s hedonic regression model include the size and medium of the painting and the auction house and year in which the painting was sold. The indexes show that average annual returns across all artists range between four and fifteen percent and with a mean of eight percent, with the highest returns for works by Brett Whiteley, Jeffrey Smart, Cecil Brack and Margaret Olley. Risk-adjusted returns are generally lower, with reward-to-volatility …