American beauty: trade flows and export costs of US movies

This paper estimates a hedonic model of revenues for 1431 American movies in 45 non-American countries over the period 2002–2013. Such an extensive analysis is proven to be useful to estimate the effect of indicators of geographical and cultural distance on total revenue and the number of American films exported to non-American countries once the model specification also controls for relevant film features. It is found that indicators of cultural and geographical distance, in addition to the Human Development Index, have a significant effect on both the number of American films shown and the revenue obtained. Estimation results have been also used to appraise the importance of film features in different groups of countries from the perspective of their degree of development and distance from the USA.