Climbing the ladder? The gender gap in art prices across artists’ cohorts in the Dutch art market

Abstract

This study focuses on gender-based price differences across age cohorts in the primary art market, where art is sold for the first time, largely by living artists. This is an area that remains underexplored due to a lack of data on artwork sales. We use an exclusive dataset from the Mondriaan Fund, consisting of 10,922 paintings sold, under the Kunstkoopregeling scheme, by 663 Dutch artists from 2000 to 2010 in the Netherlands. Given the presence of significant unobserved heterogeneity, we use finite mixture models to estimate hedonic painting price equations and to decompose the gender price gap. Additionally, we use the standard Oaxaca–Blinder model to compare our results with a more traditional approach to estimating gender differences. Our findings indicate that the significant gender price imbalance for the oldest cohort is smaller in the second cohort, and is insignificant for the youngest one. The present study provides important implications for understanding gender differentials in labour market outcomes within cultural markets and other creative industries.