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

What can the Oscar nominees tell us about the economy?

why do they call them the oscars anyways

The Oscars are two weeks away and, as you might know, I like movies. 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. Some of the films do have specific blog posts attached, which I’ll include as the post goes on.

Because there are ten movies nominated, I'll do two parts, each with five nominees. This is part one. As a general rule, the post contains spoilers for the relevant movies.

Barbie - Elevate the status of men and horses

I’ve already done a full post about this movie, so go check it out! And also about Barbie the doll and her economics, too

Barbie is a movie about the titular doll. In this quasi-Pinocchio tale, Margot Robbie’s Barbie (the doll) starts having weird thoughts about aging and death. In Barbieland, where she lives, all the Barbies leave in harmony in a female-dominated world, while the Kens are second-class citizens. As a result of her mental health episode, she journeys into the real world to try and fix whoever is playing with her embodied doll version. She discovers things about herself, and antagonizes the Mattel corporation - but Ken finds out about the patriarchy, the real life’s distribution of power, status, and prestige between men and women. He brings back patriarchal gender roles to Barbieland (now called Kenland) and the Barbies tell each other a variety of contradictory things, after a pretty dopey monologue, and take back their home.

One first question that emerges from the Barbie movie is whether or not the film’s idyllic male-free world is true or not - and, according to recent research, it might be. The paper in question is “Do Women Fare Worse When Men are Around? Quasi-Experimental Evidence” (2024) by Marcela Gomez-Ruiz, María Cervini-Plá, and Xavier Ramos (hilarious that there’s a male co-author - perhaps the paper would have been better without him?). The paper starts with a simple premise: men are widely understood to perform better than women at math and STEM tests, for a number of reasons that don’t really fit the scope of a Barbie movie post. To test the theory that women would perform better without men around, the study looks at a Uruguayan compsci education program: to qualify for a coding scholarship, students must pass tests in computer proficiency (duh), English, and general skills and knowledge in math, language, concentration, and logic. The exam mode was hybrid (in person and online) in 2017 and 2018, but fully online from 2019 onwards. Men generally performed slightly better than women on the tests, but this difference was particularly stark for math, and large for logic; language had a smaller gap, and concentration didn’t have significant differences by gender.

In 2019, something weird happened: the program was only available for women applicants, whereas it had previously been open to both men and women, and afterwards, it was opened back for men. This was done because the first two instances of the program resulted in a two-thirds men, one third women composition, which was considered undesirable. The data set comes from administrative data of both the performance of the female students, using admittance rates and the number of completed questions as proxies. The authors identify the effects of the policy with a simple regression: performance indicator as a function of some controls (age, “professional” background, health, family status, etc.), and of whether or not men were allowed to take the test. Because tests were administered in January, the COVID pandemic is not assumed to impact results in 2020, and has limited effect on the results excluding 2021 and 2022 from the dataset. Comparing the indicators in question (% of women admitted, and % of questions answered correctly), there’s a clear difference: women are more successful when there are no men around. This is especially interesting because there might have been negative selection among the students: having a woman-only sample might mean that worse women apply, knowing that the competition would be less severe. When women weren’t around men, they answered more exam questions in general, and got more of them right.

Of course, other research points in precisely the opposite direction: gender-segregated teams of either gender perform worse than integrated teams. Chaleampong Kongcharoen’s and Fed Governor Lisa Cook’s paper “The Idea Gap in Pink and Black” (2010) looks at a similar question: do gender and race-segregated scientific research teams produce more successful patents? Looking at the gender and race of teams that produce patents, and at the commercial success of those patents, it is found that teams or researchers that include both men and women are more successful than all female teams, but also than all male teams, in terms of commercialization of research. What explains this difference in outcomes? A first possibility is that an exam setting might have different determinants than a research setting: even assuming widespread discrimination, women may perform better at a single point if they do not interact with men, but may benefit from mingling with similarly qualified, and perhaps better mentored and/or connected, men.

Oppenheimer - BOOM!

Oppenehimer tells two stories: the first is mostly chronologically told, and follows Robert Oppenheimer’s invention of the nuclear bomb during World War Two - culminating in the Trinity Test, and later, the actual bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The second story, told in bits and pieces, is about Oppenheimer’s fall from political grace, as a result of his rivalry with Russia hawk Lewis Strauss - Strauss supports building more powerful weaponry, while Oppenheimer favors bilateral arm control talks. As part of the Red Scare, Oppenheimer’s reputation and career are ruined, since he, his wife, and his brother had longstanding communist ties.

Oppenheimer is an excellent movie, with great performances and outstanding direction by Christopher Nolan. I am working on a full blog post about Oppenheimer, so rather than focusing on any of the actual points I’d make about it, I’ll focus on something I couldn’t actually fit into the ideas of relevance: the economic impacts of nuclear detonations.

Are nukes bad for people? According to economist Keith Meyers’ “In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud: Nuclear Testing, Radioactive Fallout, and Damage to U.S. Agriculture, 1945 to 1970” (2019) - ungated version here (PDF download alert) - they are. Using a database of county level nuclear detonations and agricultural yields, the paper estimates the (negative) impact on crops, considering that US farming policy highly penalized not planting for significant periods, and that nuclear detonations clearly negatively impact produce. The paper estimates the impact of nuclear particulates on crop production for each country during each season, controlling for local weather patterns, agricultural trends, year-specific effects, and county-specific qualities, and assuming that the specific particulates for each affected county is mostly random beyond its observable differences. Consdiering that nuclear tests were top secret affairs, and that farmers received little information about them, this is a reasonable assumption. The results were striking: for each extra 1000 parts of nuclear waste produced by detonations such as El Alamo, winter crop yields decreased by 6.1% on average, and 2.9% on the year after. However, the effect on spring wheat was much smaller, and mostly manifested as abandoned acreage.

A similar working paper from the same author, titled “Some Unintended Fallout from Defense Policy: Measuring the Effect of Atmospheric Nuclear Testing on American Mortality Patterns” (2021) uses a similar database to compare the effects of nuclear detonations in Nevada to other proposed testing locations. Matching records of radiation levels at specific parts of Nevada with figures of mortality by a number of causes, as well as data of relevant weather phenomena, the author utilizes an event study framework - where a group suffering through an event is compared to one that doesn’t before and after the event, to ascertain its impact. Using several specifications for several types of mortality, and comparing counties in Nevada exposed to different degrees of radiation, the author finds a significantly higher mortality rate in locations with more detonations, roughly in proportion to the magnitude of the explosions too.

On a less grim note, let’s do a silly one: did you know a famous economist once used stock market data to figure out nuclear secrets? It’s true: in 1954, RAND Corporation researcher Armen Alchian looked at the stock market results of various chemical companies around the Operation Castle explosion to figure out which specific material was used. In particular, there were several chemical compounds thought to be feasible, one of which was lithium, on which the Lithium Corporation had a near monopoly. Comparing the stock market returns of chemical companies to the Lithium Corporation, and to the Dow Index at large, it’s clear that lithium was the chosen compound - a process recreated by Joseph Michael Newhard’s “The stock market speaks: How Dr. Alchian learned to build the bomb” (2010).

Speaking of the stock market, do stock brokers properly price in the risk of nuclear armageddon? Looking at returns during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is the point at which mankind was closest to all-out nuclear war, there are conflicting results. According to David Andrew Finer’s “No Shock Waves through Wall Street? Market Responses to the Risk of Nuclear War” (2022), investors didn’t respond very much to the Crisis. This utilizes an event study framework, comparing firms with high and low relative risk of getting their facilities nuked. Finer finds larger negative impacts among firms that have high exposure to nuclear detonations than the aggregate of firms (there was a bear market, considering“we’ll all turn into piles of charcoal” prognoses tend to spook Wall Street), and this effect was particularly large for firms exposed to strikes from Cuba - i.e. with substantial facilities in Texas and Florida. However, any reasonable assumption about the actual impact of a nuclear exchange on the profitability of firms would have resulted in much larger stock market shockwaves, particularly for the most affected firms - meaning that, though investors reacted, they underreacted.

In contrast, the paper “Armageddon and the stock market: US, Canadian and Mexican market responses to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis” (2022) by Richard Burdekin and Pierre Siklos (ungated here) finds the opposite: if taken as a tail risk, i.e. a really really bad but unlikely outcome, firms reacted appropriately, according to a larger dataset of Mexican, Canadian, and American firms. The paper does not consider the relative exposure of each firm in the same way as the previous one, but it does use three markets with starkly different pre-Crisis trends - meaning that there is not an easily comparable case to be made, beyond risk assesments and optimism being all over the place during a potentially apocalyptic event.

Anatomy of a Fall - Sandra Voyter did nothing wrong

Anatomy of a Fall is my favorite movie of 2023, and my favorite nominated for an Oscar. The film follows Sandra, a moderately successful writer and translator married to Samuel, a middling professor and even more middling writer. After a particularly vicious fight between Samuel and Sandra, during which she physically assaults him, Samuel dies under suspicious circumstances, and Sandra is accused of murdering him.

The fight in question, which was recorded by Samuel as part of his mediocre literary output, is the pivotal scene in the movie, and shows both of their profound dissatisfactions with their marriage. Sandra considers Samuel a bit of a whiner who complains about a life that he chose. Samuel, meanwhile, deeply resents her professional success, particularly when it has come (according to him) at his expense: Samuel takes care of most of the housework, takes care of their child, Daniel (who is disabled) and even homeschools him three times a week. Coupled with his career as a teacher, he is unable to write. The family marches to Sandra’s tune: even though they live in Samuel’s hometown, she runs their social agendas, and they speak English at home, despite Samuel and Daniel being both native French speakers.

Does this add up? Well, let’s look at Samuel’s claim: does Sandra’s career advancement come at the cost of greater involvement by him at home? Surprisingly, yes: fathers who work in more flexible workplaces have better health outcomes for their wives. The relevant paper is “When Dad Can Stay Home: Fathers' Workplace Flexibility and Maternal Health” (2019) by Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater. Utilizing discontinuities in regulations on more flexible family leave for Swedish fathers, and pairing it with administrative data, the authors observe a much lower incidence of post-partum health complications compared to children born right before the policy was enacted. The comparison is quite simple: because people would not reasonably chose date of birth regarding labor market regulations (a strong-ish assumption), it is possible to compare outcomes for mothers whose partners were elegible for extended paternity leave to those who were not, simply because the elegibility was a matter of timing for newborns. Using a number of controls, the results find that women’s pyshical and, at a much smaller margin, mental health outcomes improve after childbirth, as a result of unplanned appointments (i.e. appointments that were not made beforehand, instead of greater adherence to checkups). So it is actually possible that Sandra personally, and we can infer profesionally, benefitted from Samuel’s lower workload.

Sandra’s side of the argument, meanwhile, is that Samuel is unfairly blaming him for his own personal failings (which she’s right about NGL. He’s also being sexist). The relevant paper to this is “Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households” (2013) by Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan, and Emir Kamenica (Spanish language writeup here). Utilizing American administrative data, the authors notice one staggering discontinuity: the frequency of (straight) couples where the woman earns a majority of the income is sharply lower right above 50% than right below. That is, at around 40% to 60% there’s a frequency, but at 50%, the frequency drops significantly, and continues decreasing. To explain this, the authors look at certain probabilities: the probability of a (straight) couple marrying, the probability of a woman working less after marriage, and their probability of divorce, given their relative income and the couple’s overall income and education level. Shockingly, when the woman moves from earning 49% of the couple’s income to 51%, there is a sharp increase in the rate of divorce, a sharp decrease in the probability of marriage, and a sharp rise in the amount of domestic work the woman has to shoulder. This is visualized as a growing gap between actual and potential earnings for the most accomplished women. In consequence, and coherent with gender identity norms, there is a large probability of a marriage failing when a woman’s career is prioritized, and a woman’s career suffering when the marriage is prioritized.

However, "Gender Identity, Coworking Spouses, and Relative Income within Households" (2021) (ungated here), this time from Finland, utilizes employer-employee data to challenge these results: there is no discontinuity in earnings for couples that don’t work together, and for couples that work together, the difference emerges after they start working, and it is caused by equalizing joint earnings and not by prioritizing the man. This means that, because men tend to outearn women at a given point, then their joint earnings equalize and it pushes the man’s income downwards and the woman’s upwards - so there’s a discontinuity, but a “good” one, because it favors women. They do find a similar discontinuity for marriage and divorce rates, but the absence of the income discontinuity might mean that it’s not especially common or important to break up right after the 50% mark. However, the fact that Finland is a much more progressive society than the US might mean that cultural differences could play a role, even if extrapolating to US evidence finds the same discontinuity as in the Bertrand paper, but a larger ones for spouses who share an occupation and an industry.

Either way, the impact of cultural norms could point to Sandra having some legitimate grievance: her career being more successful was resented by Samuel, despite it making more sense for the family. In this sense, it could be that the teutonic Sandra advocates for a more pragmatic approach, while the hot-headed French Samuel wants an emotionally satisfactory outcome.

Killers of the Flower Moon - What does racism cost us?

I’ve already done a full post about this movie, so go check it out!

Killers of the Flower Moon takes place throughout the 1920s, and it follows a man named Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo Dicaprio). Ernest moves to the Osage Hills in Oklahoma to work for his uncle “King” Bill Hale. There is an oil boom currently underway in Oklahoma - benefitting, surprisingly, the Osage population (a local Native American tribe), who the movie notes have the highest GDP per capita in the world, and the highest luxury car ownership stats of any county in the United States. This has attracted many people, most of them white men, who want to share in on the Osage’s wealth by doing work for them in some shape or form. The main source of wealth for the Osage is their communal ownership of oil fields, the profits from which are shared among most Osage and their families (known as headrights). This wealth, which is inherited, results in white men marrying into Osage families to take ownership of their wives’ headrights - including Ernest himself, who marries an heiress named Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). What follows is something known as the “Reign of Terror”, where several wealthy and “full blooded” members of the Osage community are murdered suspiciously - all of which had white legal guardians or were married to whites, and the situation ends up involving government officials up to and including the predecessor to the FBI. I think you know how the story goes here.

Because most of the normal points I could make have already been made in the full blog post, I’ll instead look at some studies about ethnic violence in the United States. One first paper, “Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan” (2007) by Stephen Levitt and Roland Fryer finds that the Ku Klux Klan did not have a large impact on residential patterns of segregation, or that it did not affect politics directly much. Contrarily, “The Color of Lynching” (2012) by Lisa Cook finds that traditional lynching data, such as the one Levitt and Fryer draw from, significantly overstates the number of white lynching victims, and understates the number of non-white victims by up to 50%. Another study by Lisa Cook, alongside economists Trevon Logan and John Parman, titled “Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching” (2017) finds that, using geolocated datasets of a series of lynchings (gathered from a previous post), lynchings tended to happen in the most racially segregated neighbourhoods - but only for lynchings of Black people, not whites.

The reason I brought up lynchings is to get to the point of this section: Lisa Cook’s “Violence and economic activity: evidence from African American patents, 1870-1940” (2013) (ungated here)¹. The paper Cook’s database of African American lynchings from 1870 to 1940, and especially geolocated data for each lynching. This is especially interesting because lynchings tended to happen around the same time as each other in response to national or regional political events, more than responding to specific local incidents. Surprisingly, Cook finds that up until the 1900s, there were few differences between White and Black inventors, which makes it possible to utilize a differences-in-differences approach using the years when lynchings peaked as sources of random variation. Similarly, Cook utilizes region and state specific records to obtain similar results. She also draws a correlation between lynchings in a given year and area and Black patents in that given year and area, with evident demographic controls. The conclusions are that the presence of racial violence reduces total patenting activity by 0.2% for that entire year, and for Black patenting activity of 1% a year, resulting in a cumulative decline of 40% compared to the trend followed by White patenteess. This, in turn, lead to a significant reduction on total factor productivity, and thus of economic output.

Maestro - Come out come out wherever you are

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is a really strange biopic of Leonard Bernstein, the legendary composer and conductor best known for pieces such as West Side Story, as well as his mentorship of controversial conductor Lydia Tár. Rather than focusing on any of Bernstein’s numerous achievements, the movie instead deals with his personal life: particularly, his complex marriage to wife Felicia Montealegre, as well as his numerous affairs with men, since Bernstein was either gay or bisexual.

What can economics teach us about Bernstein? For starters, let’s look at a famous study of orchestra auditions and bias, two themes central to the movie. “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of "Blind" Auditions on Female Musicians” (2000) by (Nobel Laureate) Claudia Goldin and (Biden CEA Chair) Cecilia Rouse. Using data from the audition records of eight major symphony orchestras from the 1950s until 1995 at the individual level, the auditionees are characterized by gender and whether or not the audition was completely blind or not completely blind. The paper estimates a probability function that takes into account whether the audition (each round) was blind or not blind, as well as the time period (to allow for changes in social attitudes, for instance) and the specific orchestra, to remove potential selection effects. The “treatment group” are orchestras with fully blind auditions, and the control are orchestras without them. Importantly, there are also controls for each individual musician, to allow for less talented or experienced players to be penalized - while this might conceal other forms of sexism, it does remove direct bias from the data. The results are quite clear: using blind auditions throughout the hiring process (which has multiple stages) increases the probability for women after controlling for individual factors, except for the semifinal round, which has certain particularities that make finding specific impacts difficult. One major factor to point out is that the results are not statistically significant, in general, but mainly due to the fact that success rates in auditions are vanishingly small in general, even for men - so, as a result, the effect of a 50% in likelihood of a woman advancing to the second round of interviews is very small.

The second paper I’d like to point out has to do with Bernstein’s conflict with his wife, Felicia: while Bernstein is happy to remain married to her, and seems quite devoted to his wife in some ways (for example, he cares for her during her final years), he is also interested in men sexually and romantically even during his marriage. Felicia urges him to live honestly, otherwise he would die “a lonely, bitter old queen”. I’ve written a full blog post about the economics of being LGTB+, but one interesting paper I’ve come across is “Legalized Same-Sex Marriage and Coming Out in America: Evidence from Catholic Seminaries” (2021) by Avner Seror and Rohit Ticku.

Using data from priest enrollment rolls in American Catholic seminars, the study compares states that legalize gay marriage to those that don’t, over the 2000s and 2010s. Quantitatively, the study finds that the adoption of same-sex marriage laws was followed by declines of 15% in the enrollment of new priests in Catholic seminars, but not in other forms of Catholic religious instruction that do not require vows of chastity. This is even accounting for the generalized, long-term decline in priesthood. These effects are especially strong in cities with gay pride events. The conclusion appears to be that, absent a legal and political climate favorable for out gay life, gay men will choose “careers” that mask their innermost feelings - meaning that, even if offensive, Felicia Montealegre was correct during the one Snoopy scene.

1. Cook summarizes her research on this topic in this New York Times article, as well as this interview with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’s magazine.