Diagnostic firms discover key to profitability

Union Coverage and Profitability Among U.S. Firms

This paper utilizes unique survey data on labor union coverage at the firm level to examine union effects on the profitability of 705 U.S. companies during the 1970s. Market value and earnings are estimated to be about 10%-15% lower in an average unionized company than in a nonunion company, following extensive control for firm and industry characteristics. Deleterious union effects on firm pro...

Profitability and the Lifecycle of Firms

Using data on listed and unlisted firms in the U.K., this study documents systematic changes of profitability with age. In their early years, firms realize substantial profitability increases, on average, while mature firms face slow declines in profitability. A model of endogenous profitability changes arising from product development captures this pattern. Investment in product development ge...

Learning to Discover Key Moments in Social Media Streams

This paper introduces LABurst, a general technique for identifying key moments, or moments of high impact, in social media streams without the need for domain-specific information or seed keywords. We leverage machine learning to model temporal patterns around bursts in Twitter’s unfiltered public sample stream and build a classifier to identify tokens experiencing these bursts. We show LABurst...

Cow/Calf Analysis: Key Indicators of Profitability

Exports and Profitability: First Evidence for German Manufacturing Firms

Exports and Profitability: First Evidence for German Manufacturing Firms Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the enterprise level for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of exporters compared to non-expo...