This chapter is the quantitative analysis on whether foreign-born directors show higher film yields than native-born directors in terms of the domestic and international box office, and the number of awards (e.g. Oscars) and award nominations. The study is conducted on a data set that I collected from multiple sources, and the data set includes about 27 thousand US-produced films released between 1925 and 2018. With standard fixed-effect analysis, by controlling for distributor, genre, release year, I find that foreign-born directors’ films have on average lower domestic box office and higher international box office. Also, the foreign-born directors’ films are more likely to get Oscar nominations while less likely to receive awards.
Hongyuan Jin is a Ph.D. student in Economics at UCSB. She studies the impact of migration on the creative productivity of the economy in the context of the US film industry. Specifically, Hongyuan explores the economic influence of foreign-born (immigrant) directors, who bring to the industry the diversity embedded in their birthplace cultural identity. She tries to answer whether a higher diversity level could increase the industry's overall productivity and how the diversity may affect the US-born directors' productivity. Hongyuan also has a more general interest in human capital formation and its effect on economic development. Her joint work with two co-authors on education and the effect on the development of comparative advantage in international trade has been listed as a working paper at Asian Development Bank.
To receive the pre-distributed papers, interested participants should register via this google form.
Last-minute participants can join the workshop via Zoom:
https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89976061973?pwd=bWlkU3lwZ1o5aU1UWmNoZXdqSW1OUT09
Meeting ID: 899 7606 1973
Passcode: 030311
The Transworlding Works-In-Progress Series is a space for graduate students to share and develop their writings with input and mentoring provided by the research community at UCSB. This workshop will feature research by graduate students whose MA thesis or Ph.D. dissertation project is global, transregional, and/or interdisciplinary. We invite participants from across the social sciences and humanities.
These gatherings are designed to be supportive spaces and sites of shared community in which graduate students receive constructive feedback on research papers, article drafts, conference presentations, job talks, or collaborative projects. Graduate thesis/dissertation topics can include globalization, comparative area studies, geopolitics, climate justice, urban or rural geography, migration, immigration, militarization, intersectional politics, global race and racism, global gender/sexuality, security and insecurity, surveillance, democratization, labor, Big Tech, infrastructure, media, global south partnerships, community building, human rights, disaster, dispossession, displacement, financialization, activism, cultural survival, indigeneity, sovereignty, and more.
The workshop is intended to foster collegiality among graduate students across different fields, help professionalize graduate student researchers, strengthen research publications and conference presentations, support researchers of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and create intellectual community and partnerships. We will also focus on shaping publications to target peer-reviewed journals, and provide space for practicing job talks.
We convene once per month for 60 minutes. The presenter will circulate a paper (no more than 25 pages, double-spaced) one week before the workshop so that participants can read and engage with it beforehand, and offer comments and questions when we meet. During the workshop, the presenter will provide a brief (5-10 min) overview of the project, and a faculty leader or a doctoral candidate will moderate the discussion. One participant will be assigned to take notes during the workshop to be shared with the presenter.
We will meet via zoom until further notice. Once we are back on campus we envision this series as a community-building experience, with free food and drink! We hope that those who wish to participate will become “members” of this community and make an effort to attend all conversations in the series, in order to support each other.
We are looking for volunteer future presenters. If you have a specific thesis/dissertation chapter or draft article submission you would like to present, please indicate that in your email (and tell us the title of your draft). Graduate students who are interested in presenting or participating in the workshop should contact: Tinghao Zhou at tinghaozhou@ucsb.edu
The Works-in-Progress Series is a joint initiative led by the Director of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies (Paul Amar) and the Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures (GMTaC) Lab (Lisa Parks). If you have questions please contact Paul Amar at amar@global.ucsb.edu or Lisa Parks at parks@ucsb.edu.