Galenson’s quest to unlock the secret of innovation began almost by accident. In the spring of 1997, he decided to buy a painting, a small gouache by the American artist Sol LeWitt. But before he put down his money, he called a friend in the art world, who told him that the price was too high. We’re selling that size for less, she said.

“I thought, this is like carpet,” Galenson tells me one afternoon in his office. Size determines price? His friend hadn’t even seen the painting. What about when the piece was created, what stage it represented in the artist’s career? His friend said that didn’t matter. “I thought, it has to matter.”

Galenson was right, of course. Art isn’t carpet. And age does matter. The relationship between age and other economic variables was at the foundation of Galenson’s academic work. His first book examined the relationship of age to productivity among indentured servants in colonial America. His second book looked at the relationship of age to the price of slaves. “It was the same regression,” Galenson says, still amazed years after the discovery. “A hedonic wage regression!”

So he bought the painting and set out to answer questions about art the way any LeWitt-loving economist would.

Galenson collected data, ran the numbers, and drew conclusions. He selected 42 contemporary American artists and researched the auction prices for their works. Then, controlling for size, materials, and other variables, he plotted the relationship between each artist’s age and the value of his or her paintings. On the vertical axis, he put the price each painting fetched at auction; on the horizontal axis, he noted the age at which the artist created the work. When he tacked all 42 charts to his office wall, he saw two distinct shapes (READ THE REST).

Hat tip: General Disarray