The internal rate of return (IRR) is often used by managers and practitioners for investment decisions. Unfortunately, it has serious flaws: (i) multiple real-valued IRRs may arise, (ii) complex-valued IRRs may arise, (iii) the IRR is, in general, incompatible with the net present value (NPV) in...

Accounting measures are traditionally considered not significant from an economic point of view. In particular, accounting rates of return are often regarded economically meaningless or, at the very best, poor surrogates for the IRR, which is held to be “the” economic yield. Likewise,...

This paper makes use of Magni’s (2013. Insurance Mathematics and Economics, 53, 747-756) Average Interest Rate (AIR) in order to find a performance index which does not depend on the valuation rate (i.e., benchmark return). To this end, we distort the AIR by dropping the discount factors in...

Literature and textbooks on capital budgeting endorse Net Present Value (NPV) and generally treat accounting rates of return as not being reliable tools. This paper shows that accounting numbers can be reconciled with NPV and fruitfully employed in real-life applications. Focusing on project...