BRAZILIAN FIRMS’ HETEROGENITY PERFORMANCE DETERMINANTS

Abstract

The delimitation of the main sources of competitive advantage and the quantification of their importance, are still relevant issues in the strategy field of studies. At the middle of the 80´s, a new stream of research emerged, focusing in determining and quantifying the importance of the factors which could explain the differences among the performance of a set of firms. From the results presented in these papers several discussions raised about the hole of corporate strategy and about the relative importance of those factors in the determination of the competitive advantage. In this set of works, there was developed several empirical researches whose main purpose was to quantify the importance of factors as industrial sector, year, corporate affiliation and idiosyncratic issues in explaining the firm performance. The findings of these researches can hardly be used to analyze Brazilian companies once the researches performed with Brazilian firms were done with small samples that can’t represent the universe of Brazilian companies. The main objective of this research is to fulfill this gap analyzing some factors that can explain the difference among Brazilians firms’ performance. This research used a data base with more than 14.000 Brazilian big companies for a period of 14 years. This research clarified some aspects about the importance of the structure of competitive factors for Brazilian companies.