Mei Moses Fine Art Index

  Jianping Mei and Michael Moses, the two profs at NYU`s Stern School of Business who created the price index, have recently published a study of what four recent wars and 27 recessions did to painting prices. Their database includes reported sale prices for 5,000 paintings put at auction in London and New York between 1950 and 2001. Each painting had at least one prior sale and, in some cases, as many as seven. Mei and Moses caution that their study, because of sampling biases, should be regarded as`an upper boun` on the average return collectors have received. For example, prices before 1950 are based only on paintings later resold through Christie`s or Sotheby`s. That puts an upward bias in the numbers for the obvious reason that underperformers are unlikely to make it back to a prestigious auction house. Despite the limitations of the data, Mei and Moses feel confident in this conclusion: `During the armed conflicts of lengthy duration of the last century, art indexes outperformed major stock indexes.`