Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the strategic positioning of firms and the sustainability of firm performance. The paper argues that pursuing a differentiation strategy leads to more sustainable financial performance compared to following a cost leadership strategy. However, a differentiation strategy may also be associated with greater risk. Design/methodology/approach – To investigate the research questions, the authors utilize publicly available archival data consisting of 12,849 firm-year observations for the period 1989-2003. In the first stage of the analysis, factor analysis is used to determine firms’ strategic positioning. The resulting factor scores are subsequently used in regression analysis to investigate the sustainability of performance based on the strategic positioning of firms. Findings – The results indicate that both cost leadership and differentiation strategies have a positive impact on contemporaneous performance. However, the differentiation strategy allows a firm to sustain its current performance in the future to a greater extent than a cost leadership strategy. The differentiation strategy, though, is also associated with greater systematic risk and more unstable performance. Originality/value – Sustainability of performance refers to how much a firm's current profitability can be sustained in future periods. The main contribution of this study is the comparison of generic strategies based on the sustainability of firm performance. This aspect of the strategy-performance link has not been considered in prior work. Another contribution of the study is that it considers multiple dimensions of firm performance in order to evaluate the trade-offs involved with pursuing different strategies. In particular, the authors contribute to the literature by documenting that while differentiation leads to more sustainable earnings, it also leads to riskier and more unstable earnings.

Using a unique and comprehensive data set of monthly information on advertising spending in media outlets, we examine whether managers engage in real earnings management to meet quarterly financial reporting benchmarks. We extend prior literature by: (1) examining quarterly as opposed to annual earnings benchmarks and separating advertising from other expenses, which allows us to incorporate advertising's unique characteristics; (2) exploring the possibility that managers could either reduce or boost advertising to increase chances of meeting an earnings benchmark; (3) investigating the timing, within a fiscal quarter, of altered advertising spending; and (4) analyzing actual activities as opposed to inferring them from reported expenses, which could also be influenced by accrual choices. Our analysis suggests that managers reduce their advertising spending to achieve the financial reporting goals of avoiding losses, avoiding earnings decrease, and meeting analysts' forecasts. We find some evidence that advertising spending increases during the third month of a fiscal quarter. This increase is stronger for managers who have incentives to meet earnings benchmarks and whose firms have higher margins. We find no evidence of an increased tendency to alter advertising spending after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

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Recent research documents the empirical phenomenon of “sticky costs” and attributes it to a theory of deliberate managerial decisions in the presence of adjustment costs. We refine this theoretical explanation and show that it gives rise to a more complex pattern of asymmetric cost behavior that combines two opposing processes: cost stickiness conditional on a prior sales increase, and cost anti-stickiness conditional on a prior sales decrease. These predictions reflect the structure of optimal decisions with adjustment costs and the impact of prior sales changes on managers' expectations about future sales changes. Empirical estimates for Compustat data support our hypotheses. We further verify our predictions using additional proxies for managers' expectations, and show that our model offers important new insights. JEL Classifications: D24; M41.

Recent work in management accounting offers several novel insights into firms' cost behavior. This study explores whether financial analysts appropriately incorporate information on two types of cost behavior in predicting earnings—cost variability and cost stickiness. Since analysts' utilization of information is not directly observable, we model the process of earnings prediction to generate empirically testable hypotheses. The results indicate that analysts “converge to the average” in recognizing both cost variability and cost stickiness, resulting in substantial and systematic earnings forecast errors. Particularly, we find a clear pattern—inappropriate incorporation of available information on cost behavior in earnings forecasts leads to larger errors in unfavorable scenarios than in favorable ones. Overall, enhancing analysts' awareness of the expense side is likely to improve their earnings forecasts, mainly when sales turn to the worse. JEL Classifications: M41; M46; G12.