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The global success of the American film industry facing rising costs of production, foreign protectionism, and liberal trade policies at home is an enigma. The basis for American dominance is found in market size and structure. In turn, market characteristics and microdata explain protectionist strategies—leading to a complex gravity‐iceberg model of U.S. exports. Besides purchasing power and spatial distance, cultural variables as well as protectionist strategies are important influences on U.S. motion pictures trade. Competitors nonetheless fail to match the magical American combination of movie stars, economies of scale, and popularity of English speech.

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Recent economic theories find industrial structure to be an important determinant of the pattern of trade. In the motion picture industry, economies of scale and imperfect competition, in addition to cultural sovereignty, are conditions sometimes used to justify protectionist policies. This paper examines the significance of the capital-labor ratio, VCRs, market share, tariffs, domestic market size, taste similarities, stars and domestically popular films on international trade in the industry. The results indicate that stars and blockbusters in the domestic market do not seem to influence consumption of films overseas, however, external economies of scale are present in the industry, tariffs are effective trade barriers in the industry, and VCRs increase the chances of piracy.Us Motion Picture Trade, Imperfect Competition, Industry Structure, Economies Of Scale,

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In this paper, a statistical model is developed to examine the determinants of the growing level of barter transactions in the US. Although a barter system is believed to be Pareto inferior to a money system, recent statistics of the estimated level of barter transactions in the US show a rapidly growing interest by large corporations as well as individuals in this type of trade. The primary obstacle in empirical research in this area is the difficulty of measuring the size of barter transactions. Here, data from barter exchange organizations are used to test the significance of several variables. The Ordinary Least Squares, and Cointegration and Error Correction Models are employed as two alternative empirical techniques to analyse the data. The results support the counter-cyclical arguments as well as the inflation factor. However, the notion of tax evasion as a motive in organized barter receives only a partial support.

This paper deals with a wide spread perception that foreign-born teaching assistants (FBTA) have an adverse effect on American undergraduate students. The maximum likelihood technique is used to arrive at an unbiased and efficient estimate of the grade function. It is demonstrated that while the FBTA appears to have an adverse effect on the academic performance of American students, the effect does not seem to be due to the lack of language proficiency of the FBTA. Furthermore, the adverse effect is not uniform among students with different performance levels in the course and is absent in more rigorous classes. (JEL A22, J00)