The Moderating Effect of the Sector's Level of Concentration on the Relationship Between Balance Sheet Composition and the Firm's Competitive Advantage

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relationship between the competitive advantage and balance sheet composition of the firm, based on metrics contained in the structure of financial statements, from endogenous origin (firm's balance sheet composition) or exogenous (level of sector concentration). In addition, we perform tests in order to verify whether the exogenous characteristics moderate the relation between endogenous characteristics and the firm's operational performance. We selected data from the Economatica® database, a Brazilian company specialized in information for the capital market. We based the tests on the hierarchical model approach with repeated measures involving serial and nested regressions, estimated by maximum likelihood. The test results suggest that (i) the firm's idiosyncratic features have greater explanatory capability for the firm's performance than the industry features; (ii) the relation between firm idiosyncratic resources and firm performance are sensitive to industry characteristics.