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Here’s the economic problem of antiquities: All over the world, there are historical artifacts buried under land or submerged underwater, or both. Also, there are museums and rich collectors all around the world who would like to possess these antiquities. But of course, the situation here is more complex than basic supply and demand. Antiquities can have cultural, historical, and scientific importance. There is little reason to believe that treasure-hunters as a group will respect these values.

One simple policy response used in a number of countries (for example, Italy) is to declare that all antiquities are the property of the government. While this policy can satisfy a certain populist instinct, economists will insist, as they do, at looking at the actual incentives in play. In a lower-income country, the resource needed to search for antiquities, to preserve and explore sites, and to set up museums may be quite limited. A government might promise to pay those who discover antiquities, but then fail to do so–and then also fail to preserve and study the antiquities that have been discovered. For example, imagine a farmer who discovers an item while plowing a field, and turns it into the government, which then reacts by seizing the farmer’s land as a possible archaeological site. But the demand for antiquities remains high. The incentives for treasure-hunters to circumvent the government rules about owning antiquities, by secrecy or bribery or some combination of both, will be high.

Is there some form of contract that might help to resolve these conflicts? Presumably, such a contract would support the position that governments own the antiquities within their country (or else such a contract would be a nonstarter in many countries). However, the contract should also provide a potential flow if payments from museums and collectors in high-income countries, which could be used to compensate those who find antiquities, as well as those who preserve, study, and display them. In the Summer 2025 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor), Michael Kremer and Tom Wilkening suggest “Protecting Antiquities: A Role for Long-Term Leases?” They write:

The use of leases to facilitate the movement of antiquities is not new, and a number of precedents suggest that leases are feasible. These precedents also suggest that the legal and auxiliary institutions currently used for loans between museums can be adapted to ensure that leaseholders exercise proper care to antiquities. A well-known example is the King Tut exhibit, more formally known as the “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which circulated in the United States and London from 2005 to 2008. The exhibit, which displayed artifacts from the tomb of a boy-king of Egypt more than 3,000 years ago, was leased to a private company which charged $5 million per city and generated proceeds that went to the renovation of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The lease agreements for the King Tut exhibit specified transportation, display, and storage conditions, and required insurance for $650 million costing roughly $1 million per city (Boehn 2005). A second example is the long-term lease of two thirteenth-century Byzantine frescoes that were previously stolen from the Church of Cyprus and recovered by the Menil Foundation from the illicit antiquity market. The Menil Foundation restored the frescoes as part of the lease requirements and displayed them from 1992 to 2012, when they were returned to Cyprus. Leases have also been successful in the exchange of artwork. In 2007, the Louvre agreed to lease 200–300 artworks to its counterpart in Abu Dhabi over a ten- year period for $247 million (Riding 2007).

There are obvious practical concerns with contracts for leasing antiquities, but Kremer and Wilkening argue that such concerns are surmountable. My own sense is that trying to ban the forces of supply and demand in the market for antiquities–by simply declaring government ownership–hasn’t worked well. Leases can serve as a kind of controlled safety-valve, providing an avenue for regulated and conditional commerce in antiquities. The authors make the case:

When a market is viewed as repugnant, like the market for antiquities sold and transported out of source countries, a natural political response is to ban such activity and to back up the ban with a push to reduce international demand for antiquities by making collecting them or moving them out of the country socially unacceptable (Elia 1997; Gustafsson 2010; Renfrew and Elia 1993). However, when there is demand for antiquities from high-income countries and supply of antiquities in lower-income source countries, both historical and present experience show that the incentives lead to antiquities moving across national borders.

Allowing antiquities to be exported under time-limited leases allows these demand and supply incentives some scope to function, while also offering an opportunity to protect antiquities and to keep ultimate ownership in the source country. In this essay, we have argued that a lease-based policy offers a flexible approach that will often be superior to the other policies including export bans, discretionary incentive payments, and outright sales. The advantages of leases arise because they can address a variety of issues: the incentives of private individuals with knowledge of antiquities to make their discoveries public; concerns about corruption and shortcomings of enforcement in source countries; resource shortages in source countries that can make it difficult for them to protect sites or to maintain and display antiquities; political imperatives in source countries that may allow antiquities to be displayed elsewhere as long as they are scheduled to return; a potential resolution of long-standing conflicts that involve private and museum collections; and other issues.

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