When a Master Dies: Speculation and Asset Float

We would like to thank Marcelo Fernandes, Ed Glaeser, Florian Heider, Harrison Hong, and seminar participants at Columbia University, at the Arrow Lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, SBFIN (Brazil), Tokyo University, University of Luxembourg, the European Winter Finance Conference, and the Yale-RFS Real and Private-Value Assets Conference for comments, Jialin Yu for providing the original data of Xiong and Yu (2011), and John Silberman for a insightful conversation on artists’ estates. We also thank Raghav Bansal, Zoey Chopra, Kristine Fu, and Emilio Garcia for excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.