Luisa Bicalho Ritzkat

Postan Fellow, 2026/27Cambridge Judge Business School

Luisa Bicalho Ritzkat’s research examines how investors navigate markets characterised by imperfect information, using art as a case study. Drawing on economic history, she investigates how institutions, reputation, and expertise shape investment outcomes outside the formal financial system.

For her PhD at the London School of Economics, she examined the emergence of the modern art market in nineteenth-century Britain. Her thesis reconstructed more than 300,000 art transactions, creating the first large-scale annual art price index from 1800 to 1914. The thesis the importance of information when investing in this opaque market and how institutions like the National Gallery can generate excess returns by pursuing a value investing strategy.

During the Fellowship, Luisa plans to continue integrating the study of art markets into broader debates in financial and economic history. Moving beyond questions of investment, she is interested in the role of art as a store of wealth, using historical art market data to explore broader questions of wealth accumulation, inequality, and taxation.