How intense is market competition in the Chinese economy? We extend to China, the literature that measures the intensity of market competition in terms of the persistence of firm profitability from year to year. The fundamental notion is that intense competition will quickly evaporate any short...

As emerging economies integrate their markets with the rest of the world, competition driven changes in profitability are increasingly affected by shocks of various types from the business environment. We examine the dynamics of profitability distributions under such conditions using China’s...