Essays on empirical cultural economics

The field of motion picture industry has received great attention by academic research in the recent period. This dissertation explores the American and Italian motion pictures industries. At first, it studies the production function of American movies that sell in foreign markets focusing on the cultural differences among importing countries and the United States. Main contribution to the literature comes from the application of the Heckman's (1979) two-step methodology to infer the probability of arrival of American movies in foreign countries and then to evaluate the box-office revenues for different clusters of nations built around Hofstede's (2001) index of cultural distance from the United States and Human Development data. The second part of the thesis is devoted to the analysis of the Italian movie production market, with focus on the impact of state subsidization looking not only at box-office performances of subsidized movies, but also on their quality.