The persistence of economic profit

Recently, as practitioners and researchers from developed countries have increasingly probed the activities of emerging economies, what exactly drives the long-term economic profitability of firms in China has become the most salient issue in the above fields. However, a study dedicated to the persistence analysis of profitability differentials among firms in China has not yet been proposed. This study thus employs China’s business database to examine the persistence in the incremental components of the industry and firm effects on economic profitability and tests the hypotheses that conform to the conventional wisdom of relative rates of persistence. A persistence partitioning model is fitted to a new data set, and the results show that the incremental effects of industry on economic profitability persist longer than the incremental effects of the firm. In other words, the long-term competitive advantages of firms in China are more predictable and sustainable based on industry influences compared to firm factors. These findings support the predictions of industrial organization economics, and provide some implications for corporate strategy.