Sample selection bias for Jackson Pollock auctions: A case study

Jackson Pollock is one of the most influential Post-War American artists. The art critic Clement Greenberg claimed that Pollock’s drip paintings were the culmination of modern art. In this case study, we construct a novel dataset on the auctions of Pollock’s paintings from 1984 to 2023. We consider whether the artwork was sold or ‘bought in’ and explore the determinants of the auction hammer price correcting for sample selection bias. The robust method suggests that five variables explain 85.34% of the hammer price variation for the iconic artist’s paintings.