Charles C. Moul

A Concise Handbook of Movie Industry Economics

This short handbook collects essays on all aspects of the motion picture industry by leading authorities in political economy, economics, accounting, finance, and marketing. In addition to offering the reader a perspective on what is known and what has been accomplished, it includes both new findings on a variety of topics and directions for additional research. Topics include estimation of theatrical and ancillary demand, profitability studies, the resolution of evident paradoxes in studio executive behavior, the interaction of the industry and government, the impacts of the most recent changes in accounting standards, and the role and importance of participation contracts. New results include findings on the true nature of the seasonality of theatrical demand, the predictive power of surveys based upon trailers, the impact of the Academy Awards, the effectiveness of prior history measures to gauge cast members and directors, and the substitutability of movies across different genres.

Did the Soviets collude? A statistical analysis of championship chess 1940-1978

We expand the set of outcomes considered by the tournament literature to include draws and use games from post-war chess tournaments to see whether strategic behavior can be important in such scenarios. In particular, we examine whether players from the former Soviet Union acted as a cartel in international all-play-all tournaments - intentionally drawing against one another in order to focus effort on non-Soviet opponents - to maximize the chance of some Soviet winning. Using data from international qualifying tournaments as well as USSR national tournaments, we consider several tests for collusion. Our results are inconsistent with Soviet competition but consistent with Soviet draw-collusion that yielded substantial benefits to the cartel. Simulations of the periods five premier international competitions (the FIDE Candidates tournaments) suggest that the observed Soviet sweep was a 60%-probability event under collusion but only a 25%-probability event had the Soviet players not colluded.

Evidence of Qualitative Learning-by-Doing from the Advent of the 'Talkie.'

Empirical work on learning-by-doing has largely been limited to examinations of production costs. In this paper I present anecdotal and statistical evidence of qualitative learning (the idea that product quality improves as producers gain experience with the relevant technology). Using U.S. motion picture industry data from 1925 to 1941, I reject that the transition to sound pictures resulted in a fixed increase in film-quality in favor of my hypothesis that this quality differential increased with the producing studios sound-experience. These results are robust to several different specifications. Copyright 2001 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Bank Panics, Government Guarantees, and the Long-Run Size of the Financial Sector: Evidence from Free-Banking America

Governments attempt to increase the confidence of financial market participants by making implicit or explicit guarantees of uncertain credibility. Confidence in these guarantees presumably alters the size of the financial sector, but observing the long‐run consequences of failed guarantees is difficult. We look to Americas free‐banking era and compare the consequences of a broken guarantee during the Indiana‐centered Panic of 1854 to the Panic of 1857 in which guarantees were honored. Our estimates of a model of endogenous market structure indicate substantial negative long‐run consequences to financial depth when panics cast doubt upon a governments ability to honor its guarantees.

Hoping Grey Goes Green: Air Pollution's Impact on Consumer Automobile Choices

This paper examines to what extent, if any, natural environmental factors affect consumer purchase decisions regarding “green” products. We collect and combine several unique datasets to study the impact of air pollution on consumers’ choices of passenger vehicles in China. Exploiting cross-city variation, we find that air pollution levels negatively affect the sales of fuel-inefficient cars on average. This relationship, though, is U-shaped over the observed air pollution levels, in that fuel-inefficient car purchases rise with air pollution beyond some threshold. Furthermore, a city’s income level is a significant factor in this non-monotonic relationship, in the sense that consumers of higher-income cities are less likely to suffer this reversal. All these results are consistent with the literature’s theoretical predictions of hope. The rich findings of our study yield important implications to both marketers and policy makers.

Disease or utopia? Testing Baumol in education

Baumol’s Cost Disease offers a compelling hypothesis of rising unit costs in stagnant sectors, but increased productivity in progressive sectors may generate the same prediction through income effects. We examine quantity (rather than expenditure) data from the U.S. educational sector to distinguish between these explanations. Our results indicate significant negative impacts of manufacturing productivity on teacher–pupil ratios.

Money isn't everything: linking college choice to winning prizes and professorships

We expand upon the literature that considers how characteristics of undergraduate schools affect nonincome outcomes by considering Nobel Prize winners and full professors at top 25 universities. We introduce National Merit Scholars (NMS) as a percentage of 1960–1961 class as a time-appropriate measure of student quality and show how this measure largely matches up with prior expectations and observed outcomes. We conclude with the discussion of the convex relation between NMS and these professional outcomes.

Consequences of Wisconsin's Act 10: Teacher Compensation and Employment

Wisconsin’s Act 10 in 2011 gutted collective bargaining rights for public school teachers and mandated benefits cuts for most districts. We use various cross-state methods on school-district data from school years 2002-03 to 2015-16 to examine the act’s immediate and medium-run net impacts on compensation and employment. We find that Act 10 coincided with ongoing significant benefit relative declines beyond the immediate benefit cuts. Controlling for funding level and composition reveals that Wisconsin school districts, unlike their control counterparts, have seen the number of teachers per student rise in the years since Act 10.