UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation consists of three separate papers on topics in the economics of labor markets and economic development. The first chapter is “Education and the Evolution of Comparative Advantage.” We provide substantial evidence that education is helpful for workers in low- and middle-income countries to accumulate human capital and is helpful for the countries to develop comparative advantage in products unrelated to what they have been exporting. In contrast, controlling for the relatedness of target products to these countries’ exports, education appears unimportant for developing comparative advantage in products that are intrinsically complex or education intensive.

The second chapter is “The Influence of Foreign-born Directors on the US Film Industry.” This paper studies the effect of high-skilled immigrant labor on the production of cultural products in the U.S. With director-distributor matched data, I disentangle the director’s effect from the distributor’s effect by controlling for a full set of individual distributors’ fixed effects. I further controlled for the estimated production budget to capture the value added by a director assignment that is additional to the quality of a film prior to director assignment. A foreign-born director results in a differential effect on the box office revenues in the domestic and international domain–29.9% international box office and 16.4% lower domestic box office, and it suggests that the value of a foreign-born director is likely in mitigating the “foreignness liability” of the American films in the international market and generating a higher revenue overseas.

The final chapter is “Gender Gaps in Productivity and Labor Market Opportunities: The Celluloid Ceiling and Film Directors’ Career Trajectories.” We estimate the gender gap in employment outcomes and its interaction with productivity by following the careers of film directors. We proxy productivity with the audience and critical responses to the director’s previous film. According to our analysis, there are no discernible gender gaps among high-productivity directors, but low-productivity women are much less likely to direct another film than comparable men.