Cultural Asset Economics: A Structural Framework for Durability, Ownership, and Intergenerational Risk

Modern asset theory provides robust tools for evaluating liquidity, risk, and expected return across standardized financial instruments. These tools are less effective when applied to assets whose economic relevance depends materially on continuity across ownership regimes, legal structures, and cultural recognition over extended time horizons. Such assets -here referred to as cultural assets - include, but are not limited to, heritage real estate, art collections, vineyards, archives, historically embedded enterprises, and other assets whose persistence cannot be evaluated through liquidation-based or performance-centric models alone. This paper introduces Cultural Asset Economics, a structural analytical framework developed to evaluate the long-horizon survivability of culturally embedded assets. The framework does not predict returns, optimize portfolios, or rank assets by performance. Instead, it isolates and compares non-financial structural dimensions, often observed informally but rarely analyzed explicitly, that condition whether an asset can retain functional integrity across decades, ownership transitions, and jurisdictional regimes. We argue that systematic allocation error arises not from informational inefficiency but from analytical incompleteness: critical structural variables affecting durability, ownership continuity, and intergenerational transfer are routinely excluded from formal analysis and treated only informally in practice. To address this gap, we introduce three primary analytical lenses: the Cultural Asset Durability Index (CADI), the Ownership Friction Index (OFI), and the Generational Transfer Risk Index (GTRI), along with two secondary extensions addressing yield extraction and exit flexibility. The framework is explicitly comparative rather than predictive, structural rather than behavioral, and designed for decision support rather than optimization. While inherently context-dependent and imperfect, this lens provides a necessary complement to financial analysis when evaluating assets whose economic life spans ownership successions rather than market cycles.