The Durability of Advertising Revisited
研究发现，若不控制企业特定因素，会低估广告对销售的直接影响并高估其持久性；控制这些因素后，广告的寿命大幅缩短。
Recent cross-section studies find that advertising is relatively long-lived, providing support for treating advertising as capital. This paper models the firm's advertising decision, treating advertising and product quality as complements. The model predicts that failing to control for differences in firm-specific factors positively correlated with the return to advertising will understate advertising's direct effect on sales and overstate its durability. The authors' empirical study, using several years of data for over four hundred firms, confirms these predictions: advertising's apparent life shrinks dramatically when firm-specific factors are held constant. They also find no support for the steady-state assumptions critical to intangible assets models. Copyright 1994 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.