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.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Schröder, D. & Yim, A. (2017). Industry Effects on Firm and Segment Profitability Forecasting. Contemporary Accounting Research, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1911-3846.12361. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.
Publisher Keywords:	Industry membership, Profitability forecasting, Disaggregation, Segment disclosure
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HG Finance
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Finance

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