Acceso usuarios
Saul Quintana Navarro, Antonio García de la Parra Motta, María Elena Raquel Nieto Saucedo
This study examines the financial and operational determinants of brand value in the U.S. airline industry using a balanced panel of the four major carriers (Delta, American, United, and Southwest) over 2014–2024. Employing Fixed-Effects estimation with cluster-robust standard errors and two approaches to address multicollinearity, eight model specifications yield consistent primary findings. Total assets emerge as the dominant predictor of brand value (elasticity: 0.78–2.72), supporting a scale-brand nexus grounded in the resource-based view. Long-term debt consistently depresses brand value (elasticity: −0.70 to −0.87), establishing a leverage-brand penalty relevant to capital structure decisions. Advertising expenditure enters positively in all ratio-based models, offering directional support for the advertising-brand equity hypothesis, though significance is limited by the small number of clusters. The orthogonalization strategy shows excess capacity as a positive, significant predictor, consistent with premium carriers sustaining brand equity through network breadth. Operating income enters negatively across both strategies, suggesting a within-firm profit-brand trade-off. The COVID-19 pandemic exerted a residual negative brand impact of roughly 30%, though marginally significant. Overall, publicly available financial and operational metrics can meaningfully explain brand value dynamics in regulated industries.
