The next RITM Economics Seminar will be held on Monday, June 16th from 12h15 to 13h15. The seminar will take place in room A5 (Sceaux). This is the last seminar of the university term 24-25.
Yanos Zylberberg (University of Bristol) will present “State of the Art: Economic Development Through the Lens of Paintings”, co-authored with Clément Gorin and Stephan Heblich.
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Abstract: This paper analyzes 630,000 paintings from 1400 onward to uncover how visual art reflects its socioeconomic context. We develop an algorithm to classify nine basic emotions conveyed in each painting and isolate a context effect—the emotional signal shared across artworks created in the same location and year—controlling for artist, genre, and epoch-specific influences. These emotion distributions encode subtle but meaningful information about the living standards, uncertainty, or inequality characterizing the context in which the artworks were produced. We propose this emotion-based measure, derived from historical artworks, as a novel lens to examine how societies experienced major socioeconomic transformations, including political transitions, climate variability, trade dynamics, technological change, and shifts in knowledge production.
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Link to the RITM Economics seminar web page