This study provides theory and evidence to demonstrate how relative firm profitability within an industry affects stock return sensitivity to industry-level news. Extending the Cournot and Bertrand competition models, we predict that (1) the returns of less profitable firms in an industry are more sensitive to industry-level news than those of more profitable firms, and that (2) this inverse relation between relative profitability and return sensitivity is more pronounced when there is positive rather than negative industry news, especially in industries with high (versus low) capital intensity. Using industry returns to proxy for industry-level news, we obtain empirical results consistent with these predictions. We further find that the two fundamental factors that contribute to profitability—cost efficiency and market share—each exhibit an effect similar to that of relative profitability in affecting return sensitivity. Our results remain unchanged after controlling for stock price movements attributable to common risk factors and firm-specific accounting information, and they hold over a range of robustness tests.

Using Zhang (2000) as the theoretical basis, we predict and empirically test the effect of investment growth on the relation between equity value and accounting variables. We find that (1) growth increases the slope in the value-earnings relation for high-profitability firms (consistent with growth having positive NPV), but has an insignificant or negative effect on the slope for lower-profitability firms (consistent with growth having non-positive NPV); (2) given earnings, growth increases the (positive) slope of the relation between equity value and equity book value for low-profitability firms, but reduces this slope and causes equity value to decrease with book value for high-profitability firms; and (3) given profitability (ROE), equity value uniformly increases with book value, and growth increases the slope of this relation. We also examine the valuation impact of past investment activities that arises from accounting conservatism. We find that the earnings coefficient is greater in the years following faster investment increases (which cause earnings to be more conservatively stated).