This article empirically evaluates the main determinants of business performance, focusing on the emergence and sustainability of profits for an emerging economy such as Chile. Furthermore, the paper compares the results obtained with Chilean data to those for the U.S.A. This comparison is interesting because of the recent emergence of some literature that relates geographic location to performance. The results show that the industry effect is more important in Chile than in the U.S.A., that the persistence of rents in Chile is explained more evenly for reasons associated to business-, industry- and corporate-specific effects, and that the path to lower rents is more difficult to revert in Chile than in the U.S.A.