EMPIRICAL STUDY
In this section, we use the financial indicators contained in the RC model to investigate the sources of
competitive advantage in the worldwide semiconductor industry. There are 208 semiconductor companies (classified
as SIC #3674) in our sample, contributing a total of 1,248 records to Standard and Poor's COMPUSTAT database
from 2000 to 2005. Sixty-one companies were excluded from our dataset for missing data or being outliers (any of
their financial indicators, excluding ROIC, were more than three standard deviations from the industry mean). The
final dataset contains 147 companies and 786 firm-year observations. Of these, 118 companies are located in
developed countries (the US, Europe, and Japan), while the other 29 are in the Asia/Pacific region.