This article examines the economic worth of product placement in movies over a time span of 40 years (1968–2007). The authors find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the year of the movie release and the returns associated with product placements. In addition, a similar inverted U-shaped relationship characterizes the economic worth of tie-in campaigns associated with product placements. These findings are consistent with the habituation–tedium theory used to explain the inverted U-shaped pattern in response to novel advertisements and suggest that the same mechanism could be influencing the response to an entire marketing medium. Overall, the results reinforce the notion that marketers find it increasingly difficult to get their message across using traditional media and underscore the need for the marketing industry to reinvent itself when new tactics lose their luster. The authors conclude with a discussion of additional empirical regularities.

With representation issues in Hollywood coming under intense scrutiny, the movie industry is wrestling with gender- and race-related imbalances in its power structure. One area of concern is the small proportion of women and people of color retained as film directors, coupled with little evidence of improvement in representation among widely released U.S. movies over time. In this study, the authors examine factors that explain gender- and race-related performance disparities in the movie industry. They estimate a two-stage model that accounts for the effects of selection in matching director gender and race to (1) projects of varying potential, (2) production budgets, and (3) the number of screens secured during distribution. They use instrumental variables for revenue, budget, screens, and audience reviews and find that once endogeneity and selection are captured by the models, gender- and race-based performance differences disappear. The results show evidence of biases favoring male, nonminority directors in project assignment, budgeting, and distribution. These biases are stronger for movies with female and minority lead actors but weaker for directors with high clout and for international directors. A matched-sample analysis illustrates that women directors produce similar outcomes with lower budgets and that minority directors produce outsized revenues with equivalent budgets.

A series of Strategic Management Journal studies have debated the extent to which business‐unit, corporate parent, and industry effects explain variance in firm performance. Despite evidence that the industry life cycle impacts competition and performance, the life cycle concept has yet to be incorporated into the firm vs. industry debate. Building on ideas from systems theory, we use longitudinal data from 1,957 firms in 49 industries to examine the relative importance of business‐unit, corporate parent, and industry effects during the growth, maturity, and decline stages of the industry life cycle. We find that corporate parent and industry effects increase as industries move through the life cycle while business‐unit effects decrease between maturity and decline. Thus, the life cycle concept should be incorporated within the firm vs. industry debate . Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd