A Bilbliometric Analysis of Art in Financial Markets

Though they may seem completely unrelated, art and financial markets can go hand in hand. The potential of art as an investment has been acknowledged at least since the 1960s, when Richard H. Rush, investment banker, and collector, published the seminal book Art as an investment in 1961. A decade later, economics and finance scholars started to study the financial characteristics of art, such as its rate of return and its volatility. Over the years, scholars have increasingly devoted their time to studying art in financial markets, producing a copious scientific literature, and indeed, investors now consider art as investment alternative. Given the remarkable interest this topic has aroused in both academics and practitioners, and the several years during which a substantial literature has accumulated, we carry out a bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature that studied the role of art in financial markets to explore its development throughout the years. To this aim, we adopt bibliometric indicators that measure the scientific impact of publications, journals, authors, and their countries. Finally, we investigate the co-occurrence of the keywords by means of a community detection analysis to outline the main research areas.