Is increased public spending for the preservation of historic monuments inevitable? The French case

There is a permanent expansion of the number of sites or properties listed as historic monuments in France. This expansion and the lack of productivity gains in the sector of restoration lead, within a stable economy, to an ever greater proportion of the national income being earmarked for upkeep and restoration. Hence the number of monuments to be subsidized grows. The policy does not include any mechanism of regulation. Ironically, laws governing this area have the effect of precipitating cost increases. Three possible alternatives are considered: appeals for sponsorship, merchandising, delisting. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1996cultural economics, cultural heritage, cultural policy, sponsorship for the arts,

The relevance of hedonic price indices

We argue that for the case of heterogeneous commodities with infrequent tradings, such as paintings, it is relevant to base a price index on hedonic regressions using all sales and not resales only. To support this conclusion we construct a price index for paintings by Impressionists and their followers and compare the various estimators using bootstrapping techniques. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1996price index, heterogeneous commodities, returns on art investment,

Marshall e os críticos à economia política clássica

<abstract language="eng">Marshall and the critics to the classical political economy. This paper analyzes the period of transition between the millian orthodoxy and the marshallian orthodoxy with special emphasis on the influence of the economic debates of the 1870's and 1880's in the genesis of Marshall's conceptions. It is argued that in these decades Political Economy was questioned in three different fronts: by the theoretical critics, by the adepts of the historical method, and by the humanists. It is also argued that Marshall answered these criticisms, sometimes by accepting and incorporating them, sometimes by rejecting them, and in doing so he was able to construct a new disciplinary consensus - that gave the foundations to the practice of the next generation of economists