Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of an art expert's opinion on the market price for Old Master Paintings. We focus on the case of Pieter Brueghel the Younger, a painter who massively reproduced the works of his well-known father Pieter Bruegel the Elder, after being in turn abundantly copied. In the late 1990s, leading expert Klaus Ertz curated an itinerant exhibition dedicated to the artist and published a catalogue raisonne' in 2000 to clarify attributions. We collected the sales of his paintings (autograph) as well as those from his atelier and followers (non-autograph) over the period 1972-2015. Using both difference-in-difference and instrumental variable techniques, we establish that Ertz's expertise had a significant effect on the prices of autograph works, since buyers were willing to pay roughly 60 percent more for works considered autograph after the late 1990s.
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