Cinema attendance in Europe

Abstract

Although there exists a large body of literature which has empirically investigated the impact of various determinants on cinema attendance, studies that analyse the addictive component of cinema consumption seem to be relatively rare. The aim of this article is to empirically investigate the addictive component of cinema consumption by adopting a cross-country focus. To this aim, the Becker and Murphy's rational addiction model has been tested using a pooled cross-section and time-series data on 12 European countries over the period 1989 to 2004. Results provide evidence that cinema consumption seems to conform to a rational addiction hypothesis.

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from helpful discussions with F. Blanco, J. Prieto, A.E. Scorcu and J. Sedgwick. Thanks are also due to Alan Collins for comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

¹ Although the RA model has been criticized by a number of authors (among the others, Auld and Grootendorst, 2004; Bernheim and Rangel, 2004; Gul and Pesendorfer, 2007), however, the model is still popular because it leads to a simple linear specification with testable hypothesis.

² We only treat income as strictly exogenous, allowing the shock ∊ _i,_t to affect all the future levels of the explanatory variables.