Does the star power matter?

This study investigates the role of superstars in the Korean movie industry. We apply a two-step approach: the first step is to test the significance of the star power during 1988–1999 in Korea; the second step is to estimate the magnitude of star power. The appearance of a star actor increases the probability of a hit or success by 15–19% and star power is higher than a director power. A domestic award is associated with positive performance. We find that the top 15 players among 68 actors and actresses significantly impacts on the success of movies.     

Gender bias and women’s political performance

We model voters’ gender bias as a prejudice on women’s competence coming from a distorted prior. We analyse the effect of this bias in a two-period two-party election model in which voters care about both policy preference and competence. We find that, if voters (wrongly) believe that women are drawn from a distribution of competences with higher weights on lower values, female politicians are less likely to win office but, when elected, they are on average more competent than male elected officials. As a consequence, female incumbents seek re-election more often.     

我国影视文化对社会人群影响的研究

为了解影视文化对社会人群的影响,就＂观影基本情况、观影元素、受众影响、我国影视文化与社会主义核心价值体系之间的关系＂四方面进行研究,研究结果显示：影视文化对受众的价值观和审美观产生一定影响、其主流思想性和艺术性可相得益彰。发挥影视文化积极作用,营造健康理性的舆论环境,强化人性、价值观、民族文化、爱国主义宣传。     

Multi-product firms,heterogeneous quality and exporting behaviour: product-level evidence from the movie industry

This article examines how quality affects heterogeneous multiple-product firms’ exporting behaviours. We develop a structural model of the global movie market, including both consumers’ movie demand choices and firms’ exporting decisions. A movie studio is a multi-product firm that releases many movies within a year. We model movie quality as a combination of firm-level appeal and product-level attractiveness. We find that both studio-level and movie-level heterogeneity affect demand for movie, and movie-level heterogeneity is relatively more important. We also explore the counterfactual effects of quality improvement and trade liberalization on trade. Our results show that improvement of quality increases both intensive margin and extensive margin of trade. By elimination of quota, we find that trade liberalization increases movie exports to a foreign market by 19%. The results of our study can also help improve understanding of trade in the service industry. For instance, we do not find a positive correlation between the foreign entry costs and the geographic distance, as in the case of manufacture goods.     

On the peer effects of star students

We estimate the effect that star students have on their siblings’ learning outcomes, measured by their high school grade point average (GPA) and their math grades. To this end, we couple administrative school data on grades with an unusual natural experiment in Peru that generates exogenous variation in the presence of star students at home. We find that star students increase their siblings’ GPA by 0.33 SDs and their math grades by 0.22 SDs. The effect size is inversely related to number of siblings, suggesting that the remaining siblings act as substitutes for the star student.     

Education and income attraction: an online dating field experiment

Prior studies have found a robust correlation in the education of dating and married couples. However, there is little evidence to suggest that such correlations are causal, that is, for the sake of relationship public goods such as the pleasures of the enlightened conversations that only a common high level of education might support. Being empirical studies, they cannot rule out couples matching on other characteristics like income, height or health, which are correlated with education, from driving results. We contribute to this literature by randomly assigning high and low education and income levels to 388 artificial male and female profiles on a large online dating website in China. We then counted thousands of ‘visits’ – clicks on abbreviated profiles, which included education and income information, from search engine results. We found that men’s visits to female profiles were unaffected by the profile’s assigned education level, while women’s visits to male profiles increase with the profile’s education. However, that increase was not increasing on the women’s own level of education, though their visits to the higher income male profiles was increasing on their own education. Our findings suggest that the relationship public goods that stem from a common level of high education are not at the forefront of either men’s or women’s minds before their first dates, when one might expect such goods to play a critical role in the decision to develop the relationship further.     

The effectiveness of pre-release advertising for motion pictures: An empirical investigation using a simulated market

We use data on a movie’s stock price as it trades on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a popular online market simulation, to study the impact of movie advertising. We find that advertising has a positive and statistically significant effect on expected revenues, but that the effect varies strongly across movies of different “quality”. The point estimate implies that the returns to advertising for the average movie are negative.     

Does Twitter chatter matter? Online reviews and box office revenues

ABSTRACT

With a rapid rise of text-based social media and online Word-of-Mouth (WOM) activity, millions of people express their thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics. Considering that nowadays WOM is a most influential source of information when guiding consumers’ choice and purchase decisions, in this paper we look at the relationship between Twitter messages (tweets) and cinema box office revenues. Using static and dynamic panel data regression approaches, we show that the frequency, sentiment and timing of tweets posted about a film are correlated to different extent with the movie’s box office revenues, with negative tweets being particularly damaging to the box office revenues. From a managerial perspective, this is important to know, such that film production companies and distributors can adjust their strategy accordingly.     

How well are women doing? Female non-employment across UK regions

Discussions of the UK's recent labour market performance commonly mention the contrasting trends in the unemployment rate (down), the employment rate (up) and the inactivity rate (flat). These same commentaries also notice that the ‘flatness’ of the overall inactivity rate masks contrasting trends by sex, with male rates (slowly rising) and female rates (slowly falling) and then proceed to discuss male inactivity in some detail before concluding. Bypassing the composition of female inactivity, these commentaries fail to notice that the male and the female proportions of the population not working by reason of sickness or disability are quite similar. Equally they have rarely noticed that male and female non-employment rates display a very similar regional hierarchy with female rates in the ‘North’ as much as 50% higher than those in the ‘South’, and that there is an even steeper North–South gradient in some of the components of non-employment. For example, sickness and disability rates for females in the North are up to 10% of the working age population, while in the South rates are typically less than half that size.     

RATINGS AND REVENUES: EVIDENCE FROM MOVIE RATINGS

Ratings and report cards provide a relatively cheap way to influence consumer and producer decisions. We examine the specific case of movie ratings and find that receiving a mature rating (rated R) reduces a movie's box office revenues by 20%. We focus on the specific role of ratings by constructing a mature content index for each movie and compare movies with similar amounts of mature content, but that received different ratings. We also exploit the fact that the movie rating system places specific guidelines on the number of F‐words that are allowed at each content rating. (JEL D0, L82)     

The effect of gender and race on student performance in principles of economics: the importance of personality type

This article analyses motion picture box-office gross revenue using a cross-section of films from 1997 to 2001. The dependent variable is total domestic box-office revenue. The independent variables investigated include: production budget; peak number of screens that the film was shown on in theaters; Consumer price index for movie tickets; personal income; season and year of the release in theaters; a measure of pre-existing audience; aggregate critic rating; MPAA rating; genre; word-of-mouth recommendation; the presence of popular stars and the award nominations. A distinction is made in the analysis between information available to the public prior to the release of the film in theaters (ex ante) and information available to the public after the film opens in theaters (ex post). Results for the ex ante ordinary least squares (OLS) regression reveal positive impacts of budget, summer and holiday release dates, critical reviews, sequels and several genres on gross revenue. Significant, positive determinants in the ex post OLS regressions include budget, the peak number of screens, sequels, critical reviews, summer and holiday releases, word-of-mouth, award nominations and star power.     

An Analysis of Black Humor in the Movie The Simpsons

Black humor is widely applied in literature, drama, and film. This paper, through analyzing the theme, plot, and stereotypes of The Simpsons, aims to make a research of black humor and its application in this movie in order to facilitate the understanding of the movie and present its significance on modern society.     

Statistical Discrimination and Gender Wage Gap: A Model

In this paper, I extend the model in Coate and Loury (CL) (1993) to show how statistical discrimination by employers can help create gender wage gap for men and women with equal earning potentials. Given that employers do not perfectly observe a worker’s skill type and partly rely on the average skills level of his (her) peers for inference purpose, employers’ differential treatment of male and female workers can create different skill-investment incentives for them, which in turn justify employers’ discrimination in the first place. The second result of this paper which is not possible within the original CL framework is that I point to the possibility that there exist circumstances under which the gender wage gap can not be eliminated without the formerly advantaged sex being negatively affected.     

Movie piracy and sales displacement in two samples of Chinese consumers

Intellectual property piracy is widely believed, by authorities in both US industry and government, to be rampant in China. Because we lack evidence on the rate at which unpaid consumption displaces paid consumption, we know little about the size of the effect of pirate consumption on the volume of paid consumption. We provide direct evidence on both the volume of unpaid consumption and the rate of sales displacement for movies in China using two surveys administered in late 2008 and mid-2009. First, using a survey of Chinese college students’ movie consumption and an empirical approach parallel to a similar recent study of US college students, we find that three quarters of movie consumption is unpaid and that each instance of unpaid consumption displaces 0.14 paid consumption instances. Second, a survey of online Chinese consumers reveals similar patterns of paid and unpaid movie consumption but a displacement rate of roughly zero. We speculate on the small displacement rate finding relative to most of the piracy literature.     

On the Exportability of Korean Movies

The authors investigate factors that may affect the exportability of Korean films released from 1996 to 2002. They employ a binary probit model to test the exportability. The findings indicate that the number of screens, action genre, and year dummies of 2000 and 2001 are important determinants of exportability in the overall model. The authors tried to capture the dynamic aspect of exportability by holding outside factors constant. Over the previous years (1996–99), they found that factors that reduce the asymmetric information problem are important predictors of exportability. On the other hand, the star power and number of screens exhibited in the domestic market are strong predictors of exportability during the recent period. This result confirms that the recent expansion and success of the Korean movie industry (such as the effect of Hallyu ) serves as an effective signal to the international film market. Their analysis of cultural discount is inconclusive.     

Talent and publicity as determinants of superstar incomes: empirical evidence from the motion picture industry

By drawing on the two prevailing economic stardom theories, the paper investigates the sources of superstardom in the US movie industry. For the econometric analysis, we use income and popularity data of screen actresses and actors from the annual Celebrity 100 lists as published by Forbes Magazine. The empirical findings indicate that Hollywood, in contrast to other professional settings, supports two different types of stars. While ‘talent stars’ exploit acting merit, it is media exposure that drives the income of ‘publicity stars’. Apparently, in the motion picture industry both underlying resources are equally important and equally valued. Based on these insights we develop concrete recommendations for the career management of artists and the management of film projects.     

Male and Female Recoveries in Medical Malpractice Cases

This study analyzes male and female recovery resulting from medical malpractice injuries to discern the importance to the recovery differential of gender differences in recoveries for medical malpractice injuries. We find that the pattern of recoveries follows one similar to that found in studying wage differentials between males and females. Differences in the relative magnitudes of foregone earnings and nonmarket loses are reflected in the composition of recoveries. In addition, we find a recovery gap in which females receive substantially less in recoveries when they receive male's average compensation for medical malpractice injuries. However, only a small portion of the male and female recovery differential is explained by the characteristics of the claims, leaving a substantial portion of the differential unexplained.     

Modelling movie attendance with seasonality: evidence from China

High-frequency data improves the timeliness of movie attendance forecasts, but also results in the issue of seasonality. The main objective of this article is to build and test a novel movie attendance model that considers seasonality. Based on the Bass model, we combine an intertemporal demand shift pattern and the binary elements of seasonality – weekends and holidays – and propose a model called DISBM. We chose a sample of 58 movies released in China in 2013 to evaluate our proposal. The empirical results suggest that DISBM has better performance than other seasonal models. We demonstrate that the intertemporal demand shift results in weekend fluctuations, while the extra demand causes the seasonal holiday effect. The intent of this study is to better understand various movie attendance diffusions given different seasonal effects, in order to develop corresponding marketing strategies.     

Black–white wage differentials: duration and probability unemployment effects in a multiple of sample selection bias model

The extent to which probability and duration of unemployment affect the black–white wage differentials is examined in this paper. The paper simultaneously incorporates in the wage equation the multiple sample selection bias that occurs as a result of individuals’ propensity to be in the labor force, and the firm’s hiring decisions. The results reveal a substantial contribution of the duration of unemployment variable to the black–white wage differential, but a small portion of the differential is explained by the probability of unemployment. The results also indicate a sizeable difference between the contribution of the duration of unemployment variable to the male’s wage differentials (26%) and to the female’s (35%). The study finds that an individual’s labor force decision as well as a firm’s hiring decision are important in the wage determination process and that failure to account for the sample selectivity bias due to these two decisions will result in either underestimating or overestimating the wage differentials between black and white workers. At the macro level, the results seem to suggest that promotion of racial wage equality should be associated with policies that will minimize blacks’ incidence of unemployment and duration of unemployment spells.