Industry and Size Effects in Corporate Performance: An Empirical Research on Selected EU Countries
分析了欧盟国家中行业因素和企业规模对财务比率衡量的企业绩效的影响，发现行业效应通常比规模效应更显著，对投资决策有参考价值。
The aim of the paper is to analyse the influence of industry specific factors and firm size on corporate performance in the EU countries. Most of the hitherto analyses have focused on corporate performance reflected mainly in stock returns. This paper is one of the few attempts to consider fundamental ratios, which might also be useful indicators for investment decisions based on corporate performance. The analysis is meant to find whether the corporate performance reflected in financial ratios is affected by industry or size effect more, and therefore to compare the relative importance of the two effects. The financial ratios are obtained from harmonised aggregated financial statements published by the European Commission in the BACH database. The ratios characterize three major analytical areas of enterprises, i.e. their profitability, liquidity and solvency. The data analysed relates to three size groups, thirteen industries, ten countries and nine years: 1999-2007. The applied methodology includes analysis of variance and classification method of k-means grouping. Findings provide empirical evidence that in most cases the industry effect tends to dominate over the size effect.