Replication package for: Bowling Alone at the Box Office? Social Capital and Cinema Attendance in the United States and Europe

This package reproduces every table and figure in the paper. The paper asks whether the decline in social ties described by Putnam can explain falling cinema attendance. It first looks at the United States as a single time series for 2000–2024. The main test is a panel of 28 European countries for 2005–2024. Four measures of social ties are used: the SolAbility social capital pillar, Gallup social support and generosity from the World Happiness Report, and the share of one-person households. Contents data/cinema_panel_2000_2025.csv: cinema admissions for 41 UNIC markets (European countries plus Saudi Arabia), 2005–2025. For 2015–2025 the figures are transcribed from UNIC annual reports. For 2005–2014 they come from UNESCO UIS indicator 220063, spliced to the UNIC levels. Every value has a source and a flag. data/unic_transcriptions/: the country tables transcribed from each UNIC report (2016–2026 editions), with the source URLs. Social capital and household series: an extract of the SolAbility GSCI social capital pillar (sample countries and the USA only); a World Happiness Report 2024 panel; one-person household shares from Our World in Data. US series: tickets, box office gross, average price and wide releases (The Numbers); Netflix paid memberships (Form 10-K). code/: Stata do-files 00–06 (00_master.do installs the required packages and runs the rest in order), plus Python scripts that rebuild the admissions panel and draw the figures. figures/: Figures 1–4. How to replicateThe individual files are listed here so you can browse them. To run the code, download cinema_social_capital_replication.zip. It keeps the folder structure the scripts expect (data/, code/, figures/, logs/). Then set global ROOT in code/00_master.do and run it. Step 02 downloads World Development Indicators live, so it needs an internet connection. Requirements: Stata 19.5, and Python 3 with pandas, numpy and matplotlib. See README.md for details. Transcription and checksThe UNIC tables were extracted from the report PDFs with the help of a large language model (Anthropic’s Claude) and then checked in two ways. First, 139 cross-report consistency checks compared each report’s printed change with the previous report’s printed level. Second, the 2015–2017 values were compared with the independent UNESCO series. LicenceThe author’s code and derived files are released under CC BY 4.0. Third-party data stay under their owners’ terms (UNESCO UIS: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO; Our World in Data: CC BY 4.0; World Happiness Report: free use with citation). The SolAbility series is included as an extract provided for academic use. Please cite the original sources when reusing the data.