The Department of Economics Microeconomics Seminar Series presents:

"Can Motion Picture Production Incentives Create a Local Film Industry?"
with Patrick Button, Graduate Student, Economics, UC Irvine

Tuesday, October 7, 2014
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Social Science Plaza A, Room 3132

Incentives for motion picture production are a recent strategy used to establish, or protect, a local film industry. Despite their explosive popularity since the mid 2000's, their impacts on the film industry have not been quantified. Button estimates their impacts, at the U.S. state level, on filming location and employment using two difference-in-differences methodologies: panel regression analysis and synthetic control case studies. For incentive data, he uses a database he created of all U.S. state incentives from 1980 to 2012. For filming location, he uses the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com), and he uses the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data for employment. He finds that most incentives have small or no effects on filming location and employment suggesting an inability of these incentives to create a local industry. If these tax incentives do not affect filming location much, then tax incentives in general likely have little effect on the location choices of firms, since filming is much more mobile.

For further information, please contact Maria Hernandez, hernanm4@uci.edu or 949.824.4834.