This paper aims to provide a foundation for the notion of economic rate of return and investigate its relations with accounting rates of return. Introducing the notion of depreciation class (the set of depreciation schedules with the same aggregate book value) it is shown that the mean of the...

Firm Profitability - Does it really matter for shareholder return or ROE (return on equity)? Does this question sound oxymoron and antithetic? Not really. On the contrary, evidence has surfaced that Returns on equity - based on the shareholders' equity accounted in the balance sheet - is not...

This study describes a comprehensive profitability analysis that introduces several novel ratios and decompositions. Key innovations relate to the separation and analysis of activities other than operating and financing, and, most importantly, to the decomposition of operating profitability....

We show that the standard notion of residual income (RI) does not fulfill additive coherence. This gives rise to ambiguities and inconsistencies. The pitfall resides in the capital charge, which blends a non-market value with a market rate. We solve the problem by using a capital charge based on...

Price Earnings- and Market Book-ratios presume a systematic link between financial statement data and company value. We analyze this relationship in a steady state model with overlapping capacity investments where company value is inferred from a constant growth residual income model. We...

This paper generalizes Makeham's formula, allowing for varying interest rates and for a non-flat structure of valuation rates. An average interest rate (AIR) is introduced, as well as an average valuation rate (AVR), which exist and are unique for any asset. They can be computed either as...

We document novel facts about the U.S. stock market during the past forty years which show opposing characteristics to the prior decades: A negative cross-sectional correlation between firms' investment and profitability, and strong premia of investment and profitability factors which are...

The winner-takes-all business model followed by many U.S. Internet firms predicts that spending on intangibles will exhibit increasing profitability returns-to-scale. That is, larger expenditures should be more profitable per dollar of investment than small expenditures because larger...

This paper shows how the outputs of the accounting measurement process can be translated into terms that can be used in economic decisions. We introduce the notion of Term Structure of Capital Values (TSCV), uniquely associated to a Term Structure of Interest Rates (TSIR). We show that the state...

Accruals are the non-cash component of earnings. They represent adjustments made to cash flows to generate a profit measure largely unaffected by the timing of receipts and payments of cash. Prior research uncovers two anomalies: expected returns increase in profitability and decrease in...