Advertising expenditure and consumer prices

This paper studies the effect of a change in the marginal costs of advertising on advertising expenditures of firms and consumer prices across industries. It makes use of a unique policy change that caused a decrease of the taxation on advertising expenditures in parts of Austria and a simultaneous increase in other parts. Advertising expenditures move immediately in the opposite direction to the marginal costs of advertising. Simultaneously the price reaction to advertising is negative in some industries (food, education) and positive in other industries (alcohol, tobacco, transportation, hotels and restaurants), depending on the information content of advertising. The paper reconciles these findings using a model that contains informative and persuasive forces of advertising.