The Smuggling of Art, and the Art of Smuggling: Uncovering the Illicit Trade in Cultural Property and Antiques

The paper empirically analyze the illicit trade in cultural property and antiques, taking advantage of different reporting incentives between source and destination countries. The authors generate a measure of illicit trafficking in these goods based on the difference between imports recorded in United States’ customs data and the (purportedly identical) trade as recorded by customs authorities in exporting countries. This reporting gap is found to be highly correlated with the corruption level of the exporting country as measured by commonly used survey-based indicies, and that this correlation is stronger for artifact-rich countries. The analysis provides a useful framework for studying trade in illicit goods. Further, the results provide empirical confirmation that survey-based corruption indicies are informative, as they are correlated with an objective measure of illicit activity.