And the Oscar for Economics Goes To... (1/2)

What can the 2025 Oscar nominees tell us about the economy?

tedesco for pope lowkey like the emilia perez oscar campaign and both got tanked by strange racist rants

So, as you might know, I like movies, and the Oscars are today. Last year I did something fun and posted a small economics roundup for the Best Picture nominees (in two parts). Instead of looking at every single nominee and doing a deep-dive of the economics thereof, I had a different idea: look at most of them, and do a briefer take on some economic concept related to them.

Because there are ten movies nominated this year, I'll do two parts, each with five nominees. Part 2 should come out over the next couple of days. This is part one.

As a general rule, the post contains spoilers for the relevant movies: Anora, Emilia Pérez, Conclave, The Brutalist, and A Complete Unknown

Anora - Health insurance, workers' comp, and a 401K

Anora is a movie about the titular character, a New York sex worker from Brighton Beach’s Russian-speaking community, who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, Vanya (nickname for Ivan) in Las Vegas so he can stay in the United States. The movie is kind of a Disney princess fairy tale and kind of a comedy and also kind of a social drama that deals with sex work as a job, social disparities, and in some more indirect ways, the immigrant experience. I thought the movie was great, especially the performances and screenplay, but I though Ani (she doesn’t go by her full name for reasons) was kinda anoymous and vague in a way most other characters weren’t. But it’s still a great watch and among the better nominees.

Anyways, onto the economics. Does Ani marrying Vanya make sense? Well, yes and no. According to the paper “Hypergamy Revisited: Marriage in England, 1837-2021” (2023) by Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins, the average social rank of women’s husbands has historically been quite similar to the social rank of the brides’ fathers, per a British register of marriages 1837-2021 and 1912-2007; that is, it is not common to find “gold digger” (a term used for the titular character) marriages that often. If we take education to be a rough proxy for class, the paper “Assessing racial and educational segmentation in large marriage markets” (2024) by Edoardo Ciscato finds that the main factor in educational homogamy (that is, marriages between similarly educated people) is around half a lack of social interaction, and half simply more favorable matches between the like-minded. However, Vanya and Ani tying the knot in Vegas makes sense because of one factor: she’s a native-born US citizen, and he’s not. The paper “There’s More to Marriage Than Love: The Effect of Legal Status and Cultural Distance on Intermarriages and Separations” (2025) by Jérôme Adda, Paolo Pinotti, and Giulia Tura finds that legal immigration status was determinant for immigrant marriages in the EU: after Poland and Romania joined the European Union in the 2000s, the likelihood of natives and immigrants intermarrying was reduced by 40%, and the likelihood of divorce rose 20%. Additionally, legal status is a major boost to marriageability, to the point where it can cancel out many types of homogamy - in particular, being a lawful resident versus not implies a boost to “attractiveness” similar to 6 years of education, or a 7-year age gap. However, marriages between natives and immigrants tend to benefit the native the most, and legalizing the immigrant spouse transfers welfare to them. And finally, cultural factors are crucial, with more “culturally close” natives and migrants having a higher likelihood of marrying - such as the Russian-speaking Ani and the Russian Ivan.

The final question is the topic of sex work (known coloquially as “prostitution”), which is kinda vaguely touched upon in the movie - it’s presented as regular work, but work that subjects the worker to precarity and exploitation. Well, if sex work is work, it should be exposed to market forces - which it is. Let’s start with some general numbers: a 2014 report by the Urban Institute found that for eight US cities the market value of the underground sex economy was between 39 and 290 million dollars, including commercial sex and also “darker” stuff like sex trafficking and child pornography, as well as a variety of ancillary services like babysitters, clerical employees, security, or money laundering fronts. A classic here is “An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution” (2007) by Steven Levitt and Alladi Venkatesh, featured in Freakonomics (review here) in 2009. Looking at Chicago, and combining transaction data from prostitutes and police force data, the authors find that sex workers can earn four times as much their hourly wage by “turning tricks”, but at the cost of enormous risk - for example, being coerced by police officers into exchanging sex for favors. Supply for sex work is fairly elastic, with demand during holidays being higher (in this case the fourth of July), and prices being higher - but, surprisingly, there isn’t a substantial premium for not wearing a condom. There’s an interview criticizing Levitt’s summary in Freakonomics with a somewhat provocative title, so linking it here too for fairness. Additionally, the market for sex work is also responsive to macroeconomic forces: also for Chicago, this smaller publication from 2014 titled “Macroeconomic Forces within the Market for Prostitution” by multiple Stanford undegraduates finds that a 1 point hike in the unemployment rate decreases solicitation related arrests by 4.5%, pointing to the market for sex work being procyclical (that is, declining during recessions) rather than countercyclical (that is, being a last resort for women). One final paper, “The economics of sex work and major sporting events: Learning from the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa” (2022) by Kazungu et al. also finds that demand factors dominate supply: during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the demand for sex work spiked, such that prices increased, and especially that the premium for unprotected sex (contradicting Levitt) was quite high, 36% regularly, and increased to 40% during the Cup and 57% after it. Lastly, the type of sexual act (from hand or mouth stuff to boring old vanilla sex to anal sex) determined both the likelihood of condom use and the price of services.

Finally, the obvious question: is it like, a good idea? Firstly, the Urban Institute study finds that women are frequently manipulated or groomed into the trade, and that the internet made it easier to promote and engage in the sex trade, particularly child pornography. The effect of legalizing sex work on sex crimes is unclear: opening “adult entertainment” establishments is linked by this 2021 study to a 13% reduction in sex crimes, but other researchers have impugned the findings and the data¹. Similarly, research from 2024 finding that banning sex work increases the incidence of rape seems attributable to a coding error, such that the effect found is null. And the effect of online pornography seems a bit less positive: while internet access is associated to a reduction in sexual assault cases, it’s also possible that the effect is driven by consumption of pornography specifically - for instance, YouTube outages are linked to spikes in sexual assault cases, seemingly linked to porn consumption.

But of course, the biggest impact is on the sex workers: is it good for them to be in the sex trade? No. The paper “Outside Options and the Supply of Sex Work” by Ruchi Mahadeshwar and Alex Zhou (2024) uses a field experiment in Cambodia to test whether leaving the sex trade increases earnings - and they find that it reduces sex work participation by 13% and increases earnings by 20%, leading to a 13% increase in net earnings. This means that the supply of sexual labor has a very elastic negative cross-price elasticity (that is, changes in “normal job” wages are strongly reflected oppositely in sex work supply), and that under standard labor choice models, this implies that the marginal hour of sex work is 16 times less enjoyable to workers than an hour of “normal work”. So not good!

The Brutalist - The destination, not the journey

The Brutalist tells the story of Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States to “make his fortune” and bring his wife Erszebet and niece Zsofia to live with him. After failing to establish an architecture business, he captures the imagination of tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren, who engages his services to build a library slash chapel slash gymn slash community center in the brutalist style. The movie mostly revolves around the “dark side of the American Dream”, focusing on violence, prejudice, exploitation, and exclusion faced by immigrants and other marginalized groups, as well as drug addiction and for whatever reason the relationship of Holocaust survivors to the state of Israel. The movie, I’m sad to say this, has astonishing performances and is excellently directed, but just bites off more than it can chew and doesn’t manage to stick the landing.

The first paper to note is “Innovators: Architects” by David Galenson (2010), which looks at the achievements of architects and how their influence is measurable. Looking at surveys of textbooks, Galenson finds two general classes: experimental architects, whose ideas developed mostly visually and through sketches, and conceptual architects, who develop their designs from clear-cut ideas and concepts. For conceptual architects, their early works are most influential (for example, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial); for experimental architects, it’s latter works. As revealed in the end of the movie, Laszlo Toth is on the conceptual end, so it would make sense that his design for the Van Buren Institute (started when he was in his 30s or 40s) would be his most influential creation, as well as a highly conceptual building based on his experiences being imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.

Surprisingly, the concept for the Van Buren Institute (a mix of a gym, library, church, and community center) is quite sensible: following the paper “The Returns to Public Library Investment” (2024) by Gregory Gilpin, Ezra Karger, and Peter Nencka, investment in public libraries increases attendance and circulation, and significantly boosts children’s performance in reading tests. Similarly (and more closely to the Institue), the paper “Knowledge Access: The Effects of Carnegie Libraries on Innovation” by Enrico Berges and Nencka (2020), finds that the opening of libraries by the philantropist Andrew Carnegie had an increase of 7% to 11% in patents over the following 20 years compared to similar towns that only received a grant from the robber baron. And finally, the paper “Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés” (2024) by Jinkyong Choi, Jorge Guzman and Mario Small finds that, across a variety of possible comparisons (including a program run by NBA star Magic Johnson), a Starbucks opening in a neighborhood increases the number of startups by 9% to 18% over the following seven years, mostly via fomenting greater exchange of ideas.

The movie’s major theme is the immigrant expeirence and the American dream - exactly what it’s trying to say isn’t very clear (given the confusing ending), but it seems generally ambivalent to it. I wrote about this more extensively in my review of the excellent book Streets of Gold by Leah Boustan and Ren Abramitzky, which deals with immigrant mobility, assimilation, and integration into American society. As I mentioned in last year’s segment about Past Lives, moving tends to be economically beneficial for the people moving, and immigrants tend to change their names to “fit in” (rationally, to be fair²): Laszlo’s wife Erzsebeth goes by “Elizabeth” in some contexts (for example, with the Van Burens), and his cousin Attila Molnar renames to Attila Miller and marries a Catholic woman. To be fair, it was fairly common for integrated Jews to intermarry: according to the paper “Leaving the Enclave: Historical Evidence on Immigrant Mobility from the Industrial Removal Office” (2023) by Abramitzky, Boustan, and Dylan Connor, Jews who were relocated from Jewish enclaves in New York City both were more successful, were more likely to intermarry, and (if they stayed) were less likely to have a very “Jewish” last name.

A Complete Unknown - Like A Rolling Stone

A Complete Unknown is a biopic of Bob Dylan, the legendary folk/rock singer and Nobel Laureate (in Literature), during his early career in the first half of the 1960s, particularly his friendship with other musicians, his creative transformation from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan to Highway 61 Revisited, and his romantic entanglements (particularly with Joan Baez). The movie is a pretty enjoyable watch with strong performances and they really pull of the music.

The first paper to look at is “Innovators: Songwriters” by our friend David Galenson (2009), which examines whether songwriting follows a similar pattern as architecture - that is, writers who were more interested in clear, universal, image-based songs (“craftsmen”), versus more personal and expressive music (“artists”). The former are, according to Galenson, more likely to increase in skill and relevance as they age, while the latter tend to have their biggest hits early on and settle into certain ways that constrain their latter music. Dylan is a clear example of the latter group, with most of his influential work coming from his first few albums, and him struggling creatively later on. Dylan’s on-again-off-again love interest Joan Baez is an interesting case, since her career is kind of in the middle but seems to follows more the “craftsman” model (to my knowledge), with some of her later songs gaining more prominence (including her biggest hit, Diamonds and Rust, about her relationship with Dylan), and with them usually having a concise, oftentimes political message.

Now, the movie portrays the music industry in a certain way, but a lot has changed - particularly after the 1990s. In “Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music” (2005) by Marie Connolly and Alan Krueger, the authors find that, firstly, concert tickets are the main source of musician income, and that incomes are very skewed towards the biggest performers. Ticket prices (as noted in this post about Taylor Swift) have been growing to stratospheric levels, in large part due to increased concentration not just of ticket platforms but also of artists. However, and against all odds, it doesn’t seem that the music industry has homogeneized: “Pop Internationalism: Has A Half Century of World Music Trade Displaced Local Culture?“ (2010) by Fernando Ferreira & Joel Waldfogel finds that, in fact, musican “trade” between different countries follows the same patterns as regular trade, and therefore countries closer to each other, and especially that speak the same language, have a clear advantage, with a non-dominant share of English language music.

Technology, copyright law, and other external factors have also played a major role. In this sense, this 2010 paper by Julie Mortimer, Chris Nosko & Alan Sorensen titled “Supply Responses to Digital Distribution: Recorded Music and Live Performances” takes a look at the impact of online piracy on album sales, and finds that large performers don’t have much of a loss either way, but smaller ones suffer from reduced album sales but increased ticket sales, largely due to higher awareness. Of course, even if piracy is a risk for performers, it is still rational to enter the music business, since they tend to prioritize fame and recognition while younger, and fortune after success is guaranteed - as seen in the paper “Selling Out: and the Impact of Music Piracy on Artist Entry” (2014) by Joshua Gans. In this sense, the rise of streaming services have significantly reduced piracy more than they have decreased permanent purchases, as seen in the paper “Streaming Reaches Flood Stage: Does Spotify Stimulate or Depress Music Sales?” (2015) by Luis Aguiar and Waldfogel.

However, Spotify has not been a harmless development for the music industry: per “Platform Power Struggle: Spotify and the Major Record Labels” (2024) by Aguiar, Waldfogel, and Axel Zeijen, they find that Spotify selects which artists to promote in specially curated playlists strategically, which then increases visibility for these artists - in particular, Spotify more aggressively pushes forward artists from outside the major record labels (from 38% to 55% of recommended playlists between 2017 and 2020), leading to significant reductions in payments to the labels’s large artists. Likewise, a paper titled “Playlisting Favorites: Measuring Platform Bias in the Music Industry” (2021) by Aguiar, Waldfogel, and Sarah B. Waldfogel (we love a family affair folks), finds evidence of playlist bias against major label artists, and in favor of women (at least somewhat marginally). The importance of these playlists comes from large, causal effects of playlist-related promotion: “Platforms, Promotion, and Product Discovery: Evidence from Spotify Playlists” (2018) by Aguiar and Waldfogel finds that being introduced to major promoted playlists (such as New Music Fridays or Today’s Top Hits) can raise streams by up to 50 million and can be worth, in market terms, over 110,000 dollars due to the long-term success associated. Lastly, this algorithmic pressure can be “weaponized” in their paper “Separating the Artist from the Art: Social Media Boycotts, Platform Sanctions, and Music Consumption”, (2024) authors Daniel Winkler, Nils Wlömert, and Jura Liaukonyte find that calls to boycott an artist perversely raise awareness of their work and therefore benefit them financially except if they’re taken off recommendation playlists, at which point it hurts them instead.

Conclave - This is a conclave, not a war

Conclave follows, well, the titular event: the election of a new Pope. After the liberal Pope dies suddenly, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Father Lawrence, must preside over the election of a new Pope. The leading candidates are a variety of corrupt, depraved, or racist conservatives looking to roll back half a century of reforms, feckless liberals incapable of consolidating support, or even a mysterious secret cardinal of few words.

The main theme of Conclave is a perceived crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church, from various non-specific scandals (you know which ones), to corruption, lack of trust from communities, and interreligious conflict. In this sense, the pedophillia scandals did harm the Church: per “Substitution and Stigma: Evidence on Religious Competition from the Catholic Sex-Abuse Scandal” (2011) by Daniel Hungerman, communities exposed to sex scandals from the clergy swung away from Catholicism and towards other Christian groups, although not ones similar to Catholicism or very strongly similar to each other. Additionally, “Religiosity and State Welfare” (2013) by Angela Dills and Rey Hernández-Julián finds that the sex scandals decreased support for Catholic charities, and instead redirected spending towards other religious groups and particularly increased support for redistributive government politics, which in the American context boosted the left-of-center Democratic Party.

Similarly, the lack of trust in Catholic churches and institutions has had substantial consequences - for example, the study “The Spanish Mission Legacy on Native American Reservations” (2022) by Lee Alston, Marie Christine Duggan & Julio Alberto Ramos Pastrana finds that proximity to Catholic missions increased rates of Catholicism among Natives (unsurprisingly), and increased their income and decreased crime rates, with no impact on education. Likewise, the Church has had an impact on immigrant communities: “Enclaves and Assimilation in the Age of Mass Migration: Evidence from Ethnic Catholic Churches” (2025) by Abramitzky, Boustan, and Oscar Giuntella finds that churches dominated by a single ethnic group decreased earnings and integration for their parishioners, but increased intragroup communal ties compared to other similar areas. And the liberal faction’s concern over the church’s negative legacy appears to be well-founded: the paper “The Counter-Reformation, science, and long-term growth: a Black Legend?” (2025) by Matías Cabello finds that the Catholic reaction to the Reformation led to Catholic countries to fall behind economically, due to the negative impact of censorious organizations such as the Inquisition chasing scientists out of those countries. In this vein, England’s dissolution of monasteries during the Reformation led to an increase in economic activity and commercial output, according to “The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries” (2024) by Leander Heldring, James Robinson, and Sebastian Vollmer.

Emilia Pérez - From penis to vagina

Emilia Pérez is both the worst movie nominated for Best Pictures, and also probably the most entertaining. The film is a bizarrely uneven musical following Mexican druglord Juan “Manitas” Del Monte as he seeks to medically transition into a woman, with the support of his lawyer Rita Mora Castro. Del Monte, later called Emilia Pérez, misses his/her children, and therefore reenlists the lawyer to secure them from poorly accented ex-wife Jessi, as well as starting a charity that leverages Emilia’s former criminal connections to find corpses of drug violence victims. The whole thing is both a mess, profoundly stupid, and very weird, as seen by the movie’s highest profile song La Vaginoplastía, which records the lawyer’s entreaties for a “sex change operatiooon”.

Let’s start with the less controversial topic: the Mexican Drug War. Once again, the classic study comes from Stephen Levitt: his 1998 paper “An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances” with Sudhir Venkatesh employs similar methods and a similar framework to his prostitution paper, to find that drug businesses are generally organized along “business” lines, and gang leaders do profit significantly from the drug trade, while rank-and-file gang members do not. Drug gangs exercise market power over drugs, and carry out gang violence strategically - in order to dissuade demand on another gang’s turf. Drug violence can be explained by both economic and non-economic factors, since psychological factors also drive the presence of violence, as seen in “Economic and Non-Economic Factors in Violence: Evidence from Organized Crime, Suicides and Climate in Mexico” (2018) by Baysal et al. Similarly, in “The War Against Drug Producers” (2005), authors Herschel Grossman and Daniel Mejia find that the war on drugs as extended to Colombia was economically inefficient, since the enormous expenditures on military action did in fact reduce Colombia’s drug exports by 44%, but a counterfactual policy through which the US government disincentivized farmers from participating in the drug trade by settling land disputes would have been more effective. The paper “Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War” (2015) by Jason Lindo & María Padilla-Romo does provide evidence that law enforcement action against drug cartels works: after a major drug figure (“kingpin”) is arrested, violence in their community of primary action decreases substantially, as well as smaller declines in other places where they have a presence. And for the impact on the population, it is of course Not Good in a fairly self explanatory way - for example, according to “Organized Crime, Violence, and Politics” (2016) by Alberto Alesina, Salvatore Piccolo & Paolo Pinotti, in Colombia, political contestation, corruption, and the drug-trade are all interconnected, leading to cycles of violence both political and drug-related. This is also found by “The Monopoly of Violence: Evidence from Colombia” (2009) by Daron Acemoglu, Robinson & Rafael Santos, which makes the claim that Colombian drug violence is also driven by political paramilitaries becoming self-substaining through illicit activities.

A part of the Mexican violence crisis which the movie sort of glosses over, quite bizarrely for a movie about gender, is domestic violence: in their paper “The Dynamics of Abusive Relationships” (2024), authors Abi Adams, Kristiina Huttunen, Emily Nix, and Ning Zhang find that women in violent relationships with men suffer from significant losses to income and employment, and that the men tend to impose financial burdens on their significant others even if they don’t report abuse. This is driven by both psychological factors as well as the desire to restrict the possibility of leaving for the women. Likewise, the paper “Fighting Abuse with Prescription Tracking: Mandatory Drug Monitoring and Intimate Partner Violence” (2024) by Dave et al. puts forward that reductions in the over-prescription of addictive opioids also reduces women’s exposure to domestic violence, pointing to significant linkages between drug violence and gendered violence. Importantly, per “Fighting violence against women: The role of female political representation“ (2023) by Alena Bochenkova, Paolo Buonanno, and Sergio Galletta, municipalities with elections where a woman barely wins see large reductions in domestic violence cases, largely due to women politicians pushing forward issue-specific policies at higher rates.

Finally, the controversial one: transgender issues. The movie is also, well, ham handed and inept at handling this topic. I’ve written about it in the past, so let’s take a general look at the topic. According to “Transgender Earnings Gaps in the United States: Evidence from Administrative Data” (2024) by Carpenter et al., the authors find that individuals who change their gender information with government authority (themselves a better-off subgroup of transgender people) tend to have a negative impact of 6 to 13 log points of their income, driven by various changes to their labor market status. However, the paper “Understanding Labor Market Discrimination Against Transgender People: Evidence from a Double List Experiment and a Survey” (2023) by Billur Aksoy, Christopher Carpenter & Dario Sansone finds that approximately three quarters of American workers would be comfortable with having transgender coworkers or managers and would support nondiscrimination laws, and that support for trans workplace inclusion is both understated among workers and lower than for other gender and sexual minorities. Similarly (and somewhat entertainingly), the paper “Before and after: Gender transitions, human capital, and workplace experiences” (2008) by Kristen Schilt and Matthew Wiswall finds that transitioning from man to woman decreases earnings by around a third, whilst the reverse increases earnings, due to impacts on self confidence and social factors. Following this, the paper “The Gender Minority Gaps in Confidence and Self-Evaluation” (2024) by Billur Aksoy, Christine Exley & Judd Kessler also finds a substantial negative differential among trans and nonbinary students in self confidence, with negative labor market impact as mentioned above.

1. Note I just can’t find the specific criticisms because the Twitter thread criticizing it was deleted between me finding it and me using it.

2. In fact, Streets of Gold elaborates on this phenomenon: stories that a family’s last name was changed by border officers are usually fake (because family names were recorded upon departure, not arrival), and are instead a way to save face from the reality of grandpa and grandma changing their family name to avoid discrimination. Larry Summers, a former US Treasury Secretary, has a different last name than his paternal uncle Paul Samuelson (yes, that one) for this exact reason. In fact, it’s plausible that this happened to his mother’s (Jewish Romanian) family, since her surname was Arrow (yes, that one too).