Success in the Film Industry: What Elements Really Matter in Determining Box-Office Receipts

This paper attempted to answer the research question, “What determines a film’s success at the domestic box office?” The authors used an OLS regression model on an expanded data set of 497 films from the randomly selected years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2011, taking the top 100 films from each year. Domestic box-office receipts served as the dependent variable, with MPAA ratings, critical reviews, source material, release date, and number of screens acting as independent variables in the final regression. Results showed that source material, critical reviews, number of screens, release date, and a PG rating were statistically significant and positively contributed to a film’s domestic revenue. The authors conclude therefore that the consistently significant variables of reviews, release date, source material, and certain genres contain the most explanatory power

Globalisation and the rise of india and china: challenges and opportunities for the East Midlands

Review of literature around the recent (late 20th Century) phase of globalisation, with particular focus on the developing economies of India and China. Includes an economic and policy review of the East Midlands - identifying business and strategic challenges/opportunities for the region

Economic Geography, Comparative Advantage and Trade within Industries: Evidence from the OECD

A large share of world trade, especially among the OECD countries, is two-way trade within industries, so called intra-industry trade. Despite this, few attempts have been made to examine why countries export some products within industries, whereas they import others. We examine this issue, by means of regression analysis, by examining the shares of IIT that are vertical and horizontal and by examining price dispersion. The regression results suggest that an abundant human capital endowment as well as a large domestic market increases the quality of OECD-countries´ manufacturing exports, thus offering support for comparative advantage models as well as newer geography models. But, human capital becomes an increasingly important determinant of quality over time.comparative advantage; economic geography; intra-industry trade; vertical differentiation

International Competition, Returns to Skill and Labor Market Adjustment

This paper examines whether increased import competition induces domestic workers to skill upgrade and/or switch industries. The analysis makes use of a large unique longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset that covers virtually all workers and firms in Portugal over the 1986-2000 period. Our identification strategy uses two exogenous changes in the degree of international competition. First, we exploit the strong appreciation of the Portuguese currency in 1989-1992 and pre-existing differences in trade exposure across industries in a differences-in-differences estimation. Second, we make use of changes in industry-specific (source-weighted) real exchange rates. A bivariate probit model is used to analyse the impact of increased international competition on skill-upgrading and/or industry switching. Based on both empirical strategies, and on two different skill definitions, we find strong confirmation for the hypothesis that increased international competition increases the returns to skill and induces skill upgrading.International trade, Skill-upgrading, Labour market adjustment

Firm Heterogeneity and the Geography of International Trade

A key distinction which has emerged from heterogeneous firm models of international trade is that of exporting at the intensive and extensive margins. Empirically however, the two are often conflated, leading to biased estimates of the impact of falling trade costs. This paper exploits detailed firm level data, which includes information on the destination of exports to investigate causal links between enterprise productivity and the number of markets a firm serves as well as the relative size of those markets. Our focus is Sweden’s Food and Beverage sector, which is not only highly open, but has been subject to policy induced changes in trade costs (as well as falling natural barriers) over our sample period. We have data on almost 10,000 firm / time / destination observations across 6 years and 138 destinations. Our results confirm that conflating adjustment at the internal and external margins does bias trade resistance effects. Combining detailed firm specific information with data on destination characteristics confirms the importance of a range of country specific characteristics (including exchange rate risk) and facilitates the estimation of both distance and market size elasticities, from firm level data.trade costs, firm characteristics, destination characteristics, market size, distance

Country Trade Costs, Comparative Advantage and the Pattern of Trade: Multi-Country and Product Panel Evidence

This paper investigates whether differences across countries in overall country-specific trade costs affect comparative advantage. It does so by examining whether the commodity composition of countries’ trade is driven by differences in countries’ trade costs, as well as by differences in traditional factor endowments. Industry export shares across up to 71 countries and 158 manufacturing industries for five year periods over the period 1972 to 1992 are shown to be greater in trade cost sensitive industries for countries with relatively low national trade costs. This is after controlling for factor-intensity differences across industries and for endowment differences (physical and human capital) between countries. Further, these relationships are more evident in exporting to global markets than to local or regional markets.Trade costs, comparative advantage

Exchange Rate Uncertainty and Export Decisions in the UK

Using data on UK manufacturing firms, we examine the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on firm decisions on export market entry and export intensity. The use of micro data and new measures of exchange rate uncertainty enable us to test for hysteresis effects in a new way and to test the sensitivity of results to a range of different measures. The results show that exchange rate uncertainty has little effect on firms’ export participation but a significant impact on export intensity.Exchange rate uncertainty, export share, hysteresis effects

The More the Better? Foreign Ownership and Corporate Performance in China

We examine the relationship between the degree of foreign ownership and performance of recipient firms, using of panel of 21,582 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005. We find that joint-ventures perform better than wholly foreign owned and purely domestic firms. Although productivity and profitability initially rise with foreign ownership, they start declining once foreign ownership reaches beyond 64%. This suggests that some domestic ownership is necessary to ensure optimal performance. We rationalize these findings with a model of a joint-venture, where strategic interactions between a foreign and a domestic owner’s inputs may lead to an inverse U-shaped ownership-performance relationship.Foreign ownership, corporate performance, China

Exchange Rates, Exports and FDI: A Microeconometric Analysis

Our focus is the effects of exchange rate movements on firm decisions on export market entry and export intensity. Using data on UK manufacturing firms we find that exchange rate movements have little effect on firm export participation but have a significant impact on export shares. We also investigate the effects of exchange rate movements on the export behaviour of multinationals, and find important differences according to country of origin. Multinationals firms originating from outside the European Union are less affected by changes in the exchange rate compared to those inside, whose reactions are similar to domestic firms.Exchange rate movements, export share, multinational firms