Objects of contested or illicit origin routinely surface in the legal antiquities market. To understand how this happens, this article empirically asks whether major auction houses use informational opacity as a strategy to circulate objects from conflict-affected regions while remaining formally compliant. I assemble a novel dataset of tens of thousands of antiquity lots sold by major auction houses, and develop methods that turn lot images and catalogue text into granular, object-level measures of cultural origin and descriptive vagueness. Both measures rest on contextual embeddings: visual representations benchmarked against curated cultural reference centroids, and textual representations scored against a domain-specific lexicon of attribution and provenance hedges. I provide descriptive evidence that, during periods of armed conflict near an antiquity’s likely source region, auction houses systematically increase the vagueness of object descriptions and reduce the temporal precision of provenance dates, replacing specific years with coarser decade or century references.

Does public art reduce crime? To answer this question, I study one of the largest public art programs in the world, developed over the past forty years in the city of Philadelphia, which has produced thousands of large-scale murals on building walls across the city. Yet, the economics literature on place-based interventions has largely focused on traditional treatments that alter the physical structure of the urban environment, overlooking the effect of neighborhood beautification through art. To address the non-random location of murals, I exploit variation in installation timing rather than in location. My estimates suggest that crimes that require offenders to remain stationary at a given site tend to decline after a mural appears, while more transient crimes do not respond on average. Exploring possible mechanisms, I find that the decline is concentrated in places where the mural is actually visible, while areas where it is hidden from view show no effect. This pattern is consistent with a visual-signaling channel, whereby murals raise the perceived cost of offending in places where they can actually be seen.

The paper investigates how discrepancies in trade data can signal illicit flows of cultural goods. Focusing on Italy, a country highly endowed with cultural heritage and exposed to the risk of illicit trafficking countered by a specialized law enforcement unit, the presence of a consistent gap between the value of cultural goods exported from the country and the value reported by its trading partners over three decades is documented and analyzed. The paper offers two main contributions. First, we estimate a gravity model of trade gaps in four separate categories of cultural goods, each subject to varying degrees of legal protection and vulnerability to illicit trade, incorporating a novel indicator of cultural salience and corruption indicators. Second, we evaluate international policies aimed at curbing illicit trade in cultural goods in terms of their ability to reduce trade gaps. Our findings provide empirical evidence on the relationship between trade gaps and illicit markets for cultural objects, and confirm the role of interest in Italian heritage as a driving factor. Archaeological property is further analyzed separately before and after 2010 to show that the apparent increase of Italian trade may partly result from the Arab Springs' consequences on destruction and looting of cultural heritage. Institutional enforcement through the UNESCO and UNIDROIT conventions is partially effective in reducing illicit trade.