Industry Effects in Firm and Segment Profitability Forecasting
研究发现行业特定模型在预测单一业务企业和业务分部盈利时更准确，但多业务企业的合并报表掩盖了其分部的行业效应。
ABSTRACT Academics and practitioners have long recognized the importance of a firm's industry membership in explaining its financial performance. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, recent research shows that industry‐specific profitability forecasting models are not better than economy‐wide models. The objective of this paper is to further explore this result and to provide insights into when and why industry‐specific profitability forecasting models are useful. We show that industry‐specific forecasts are significantly more accurate in predicting profitability for single‐segment firms and, to some extent, for business segments. For multiple‐segment firms, the aggregation of segment‐level data for external reporting of firm‐level financials obliterates the industry effects of their segments.