Framing the Big Screen: An Analysis of Cinema Policy Between International Trade and State Control

This thesis contributes to the law and economics literature by analysing legislative intervention in the film market, a sector characterised by intense regulatory attention stemming from high fixed costs, the mass reach of audiovisual content, and the strategic role of cinema in projecting soft power abroad. The first chapter offers a systematic review of the economic literature on film policy, organised around five macro-categories: subsidies, quotas, piracy, co-productions, and censorship. The review reveals a significant imbalance in scholarly attention: industrially-oriented topics such as subsidies and quotas have been extensively studied, while legally-oriented ones — particularly censorship — remain largely uncharted empirically. The chapter also identifies a growing overemphasis on the Chinese market and highlights the near-total absence of research on the effects of film policies in the streaming environment. The second chapter presents an empirical analysis of the factors driving the international box-office performance of American films, using a gravity model estimated on a panel of 55 countries over the period 2005–2017, drawing on data from UNESCO, CEPII, Hofstede, the World Bank, and several IP rights indices. The results confirm that market size and language are the primary determinants of U.S. film success abroad. Cultural distance, by contrast, proves largely insignificant, as does colonial heritage. Screen quotas show no significant effect, while intellectual property protection — when measured through a continuous index rather than a binary indicator — has a positive and significant impact on admissions. Notably, domestic film production reduces U.S. market share outside the European Union but not within it, suggesting that European subsidy-driven overproduction fails to generate titles capable of competing with Hollywood. The third chapter adopts a historical perspective and contributes to the emerging quantitative literature on film censorship by presenting the first empirical study of censorship practices in a democratic country. Drawing on an original dataset of over 13,000 official censorship visas issued in Italy between 1947 and 1974, the study employs an Interrupted Time Series design to assess the impact of a change in ministerial political affiliation — from Christian Democracy to the Socialist Party — on censorship enforcement. The results show that while the overall number of censored and banned films did not change significantly, appeals rose sharply under the Socialist ministry, indicating a change in both commission attitude and producers’ risk tolerance. Moreover, the gap between censorship of sexual and violent content narrowed under the Socialist-appointed commissions, confirming the influence of the Catholic Church on enforcement under DC-aligned governments. No evidence is found of preferential treatment toward American films.