This paper addresses a longstanding puzzle involving the unbundling of services that has occurred over more than two decades in the U.S. advertising agency industry: How can the shift from the bundling to the unbundling of services be explained and what accounts for the slow pace of change?...

How important are economies of scale and scope in advertising agency operations? This paper reports an econometric study undertaken to address this question. Cost models are formulated which represent how the principal component of agency costs, employment level, varies according to the mix of...

We investigate the theoretical possibility and empirical regularity of two troublesome anomalies that frequently arise when cross-price elasticities are estimated for a set of brands expected to be substitutes. These anomalies are the occurrence of: (a) negatively signed cross-elasticities; and...

We assess substitutable and complementary relationships among eight national advertising media classes, as well as the magnitude of their own-price elasticities. We use a translog demand model, whose parameters we estimate by three-stage least squares, based on 1960-94 annual U.S. data.We find...

We assess size and scope-related economies in the global advertising and marketing services business. A translog cost function is employed wherein a firm's costs vary according to its scale and two dimensions of the scope of its operations. Parameters of the model are estimated via three stage...

What accounts for the diversity and limited concentration that has long characterized the organization of the advertising agency industry? This question is addressed by treating an advertising agency as a multiproduct firm. The firm's product line or service mix is defined in terms of the set of...

The two components of the advertising industry – the creative sector that develops and produces messages, and the communications sector that transmits messages via various media – have each been greatly affected by advances in creative design and communications technologies. As the media...

This paper uses linked establishment-firm-employee data to examine the relationship between the scientists and engineers proportion (SEP) of employment, and productivity and labor earnings. We show that: (1) most scientists and engineers in industry are employed in establishments producing goods...

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of ln earnings among individuals into the part due to changes...

We augment standard ln earnings equations with variables reflecting unmeasured attributes of workers and measured and unmeasured attributes of their employer. Using panel employee-establishment data for US manufacturing we find that the observable employer characteristics that most impact...