We suggest that the failure of investors to distinguish between an earnings component's autocorrelation coefficient (unconditional persistence) and the marginal contribution of that component's persistence to the persistence of earnings (conditional persistence) provides a partial explanation to...

Financial analysis often involves decomposing variables into components, emphasizing the structured hierarchy among ratios. We distinguish between unconditional persistence (a variable's autocorrelation coefficient), and conditional persistence (the power of a variable's persistence to explain...