Profit Cycle Dynamics

Book excerpt: My thesis consists of three essays investigating the existence, causes, and mitigation of profit cycles at an industry level. The first essay examines profit cycles by proposing that the industry-specific features of how competition acts on a firm are important determinants of how mean reversion manifests in firm earnings. The evidence suggests that because competition has inertia, caused by the time to build productive capacity specific to each industry, earnings do not smoothly revert to the mean, but instead cycle around it. Since these findings affect research that uses expected earnings models, lags of capital expenditure are used as a proxy for competition in a regression model of firm earnings and are shown to be significant determinants of the earnings reported. The second essay seeks to explain why aggregate airline industry profits have displayed cyclicality since deregulation in 1978. In order to better understand the causes of these profit cycles, I build a large-scale model of the airline industry that includes more endogenous feedbacks than previous models, as well as formulations for several strategies that have been employed by airlines to mitigate the cycles. While I find that, consistent with earlier research, the delay in acquiring capacity is an important determinant of the behavior of airline profits, I also show that multiple negative feedback loops are involved in the intensity and periodicity of the profit cycle in the airline industry. Specifically, analysis of my model suggests that the growing reliance on yield management as a tool for determining ticket prices has exacerbated the volatility of airline industry profits. The third essay focuses on the insurance industry, where the delay in building productive capacity is short. I build and analyze a parsimonious model of the property-casualty insurance industry, and show results which suggest that delays in adjusting the characteristics of underwritten insurance policies are responsible for the oscillatory behavior. Simulations where the industry increases both the target level of capital reserves, and the attention paid to the adequacy of that level, show significantly reduced profit variance.