Economics of the Oscars

As the winners of the Academy awards were announced this week

Here are some social science sites for locating materials on the economics of the Oscars.

The Independent has an interesting section of facts on impacts on careers which was published in 2016

Statista has a fact file of data on the awards. which subscribers can download.


2001 academic paper simply titled “what’s an Oscar worth?”. According to the authors, led by Prof. Randy A. Nelson of Colby College, winning the Oscar for Best Picture on average boosted box office sales by $18.1 million.


Box office mojo compares income of box office hits with winners 2010-2016.


The highest grosser of 2016 was "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", which generated box office revenue of over 532 million U.S. dollars. The Oscar winner in that year, "Moonlight", generated 27.85 million U.S. dollars at the domestic box office. Colombia Economics review discussed this and other sources in a useful article in 2017

Film Industry data in terms of the general contribution of the film industry as a whole to the economy.

BFI has some data on contribution to GDP. The creative industries website also has data on TV and film production companies in the UK

the ONS has a good visualisation about the increasing strength of the UK film industry.