In the competitive environment, there is a strong prediction in economic theory that profitability is mean reversion both within and across industries. For instance, under competition, firms will leave relatively profitless industries and turn into relatively high profitable industries. Some companies introduce new products and technologies that bring more profitability for an entrepreneur. Otherwise, the expectation of failure which makes companies with low profitability motivations to distribute capital to more productive uses.
Mean reversion represents that changes in earnings and profitability is predictable to a certain extent. However, predictable variation in profitability and earnings is difficult to identify for the following three reasons. i) There are some incorrect recommendations of predictability offer no formal tests. ii) Formal tests are offered which are often depended on time series models. Tests are limited to the company which has a long earnings history. This method may produce survivor bias or inaccurate estimates. iii) Use large samples of companies and minimal survival standards to test for predictability of earnings on lagged changes, cross-section regressions of changes and other variables. But the basic error of the slopes in cross-section tests are not regulated for the correlation of the regression residuals.
We adopted a different strategy that retains the cross section tests but proposes inferences that permit residual cross-correlation. This method allows us to use year-by-year variation in the slopes and large samples. In this partial adjustment model, the evaluated rate of mean reversion is approximately 38 percent per year, but unified rate of mean reversion treats unfairly to the enrich nonlinear patterns in behaviour of profitability. Particularly, when the profitability is below or further from its mean, the rate of mean reversion is faster. Also we find that negative
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