Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/195098 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
BERG Working Paper Series No. 147
Publisher: 
Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group (BERG), Bamberg
Abstract: 
Theory suggests that competition tends to equalize profit rates through the process of capital reallocation, and numerous studies have confirmed that profit rates are indeed persistent and mean-reverting. Recent empirical evidence further shows that fluctuations in the profitability of surviving corporations are well approximated by a stationary Laplace distribution. Here we show that a parsimonious diffusion process of corporate profitability that accounts for all three features of the data achieves better out-of-sample forecasting performance across different time horizons than previously suggested time series and panel data models. As a consequence of replicating the empirical distribution of profit rate fluctuations, the model prescribes a particular strength or speed for the mean-reversion of all profit rates, which leads to superior forecasts of individual time series when we exploit information from the cross-sectional collection of firms. The new model should appeal to managers, analysts, investors and other groups of corporate stakeholders who are interested in accurate forecasts of profitability. To the extent that mean-reversion in profitability is the source of predictable variation in earnings, our approach can also be used in forecasts of earnings and is thus useful for firm valuation.
Subjects: 
return on assets
stochastic differential equation
Fokker-Planck equation
superior predictive ability test
model confidence set
JEL: 
C21
C22
C53
L10
D22
ISBN: 
978-3-943153-68-2
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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