Title: When Airpocalypse Met Blockbusters: The Impact of Air Pollution on Box Office

Speaker: Junjie Zhang, Duke Kunshan University

Time: October 28th, 2016 13:30–15:00 

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (College of Economics, JNU)

About the speaker:

Junjie Zhang is the Director and Associate Professor at the Environmental Research Center and Master of Environmental Policy (iMEP) Program at Duke Kunshan University, and an Associate Professor of Environmental Economics at the Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University. He is also a Senior Advisor of Asia Society. Prior to the current position, he served as an Associate Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Zhang's research centers on empirical issues in environmental and resource economics. He adopts an interdisciplinary approach that integrates social sciences, engineering and natural sciences to deal with environmental policy problems. His research topics cover air pollution, water resources, energy and climate change. Zhang holds a PhD in Environmental and Resource Economics from Duke University.

Abstract:

This paper estimates the ramification of air quality and theatrical market performances with daily data of Air Pollution Index (API) and movie attendance and revenue from China. It is the first attempt to assess the impact of air quality on consumption. Our data cover 829 movies shown on screens in 56 major Chinese cities during 2012--2014. Our benchmark estimations show that air pollution in China has negative effects on both daily movie audiences and revenue. In particular, a 10% reduction in API leads to a 0.19% increase in total daily audiences in a city, while the benefit in total daily revenue is 0.28%. These numbers should be interpreted as the lower bound estimates that air pollution has on the entertainment industry that includes theaters and restaurants. The baseline result that API negatively affects daily performance of movies is robust to a number of alternative specifications and sub-samples analyses.