DISCUSSION OF: An Empirical Investigation of the Relationship between Profitability Persistence and Firms' Choice of Business Model: Evidence from the U.S. Airline Industry

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T he Collins et al. (2011) study (hereafter, CRC) examines how the competitive strategies of airlines impact the persistence of their operating earnings. The study then investigates if the persistence of earnings components, such as unit prices, costs, and productivity changes, also varies by competitive strategy. The study uses 590 observations of quarterly financial performance from 14 airline companies, over the period 1996 to 2008, to examine the impact of different competitive strategies on the persistence of profit margins and asset turnover. Two airlines’ competitive strategies are identified: network carriers and low-cost providers. The paper documents that network airlines (differentiators) have more persistent operating profit margins than low-cost carriers. Little difference is noted for total asset turnover across business models. The study also demonstrates that partitioning the change in profit margin into growth, price-recovery, and productivity components more fully explains future profit margins than current profit margin alone. The paper is a nice blend of the literatures in industrial economics and both financial and management accounting. There are two strings in the paper that are interesting to management and management accountants. One is how a firm’s competitive strategy impacts the persistence of profit margins and asset turnover ratios, which are the two key components of return on assets using the DuPont formula. The other interesting issue is the examination of how volume, price, and productivity components of profit margin changes impact earnings persistence differently across competitive strategies. As this latter part of the paper uses traditional variance analysis and productivity measures, it is particularly interesting to management accountants. Below, I discuss these two inter-related issues.