Social Connections and the Spillover of Sanctions: Evidence from Hollywood

How does the impact of social sanctions transmit through social connections? In this paper, I study this question by drawing from the accusation of Harvey Weinstein during the #MeToo movement in Hollywood. Using a newly assembled dataset on actor and film information, I find that actors who had collaborated with Weinstein suffered from a sharp and persistent decrease in film output following his accusation in 2017, while they also tend to participate in more female-directed films. In particular, the drop in film quantity can be attributed to both genders, while the increase in collaborations with female directors is almost entirely driven by female actors.Further evidence shed light on two potential channels at play: the reduction of film output is likely the "mechanical" consequence of losing connections and thus access to resources, while heterogeneous participation in female-directed films is likely to imply actors' urge to signal their morality as well as the difficulty in doing so due to their damaged reputation.