Do firm managers invest the savings from tax avoidance in positive net present value projects that enhance future profitability or divert them towards perquisite consumption, rent extraction, and value destroying projects? We indirectly investigate this question by testing whether tax avoidance...

Measuring the impact of political risk on investment projects is one of the most vexing issues in international business. One popular approach is to assume that the sovereign yield spread captures political risk and to augment the project discount rate by this spread. We show that this approach...

This study provides evidence relevant for estimating and evaluating the terminal value term used in DCF valuation. Consistent with common practice, exit multiples based on EBITDA dominate those based on either net operating profit after tax (NOPAT) or net operating assets (NOA). However, both...

Overproduction reduces cost of goods sold by spreading fixed costs over an inflated number of units. An estimate of the overproduction bias helps predict future profitability, and adjusting profitability measures to undo this distortion improves their explanatory power for future profitability....

We provide a formal and rigorous justification for the Kaplan and Schoar (2005) public market equivalent (“PME”) measure of historical performance of private equity (“PE”) funds. The PME provides a valid economic performance measure when the investor (“LP”) has log-utility...

This monograph provides a thorough review of earnings quality issues and analysis. Its primary objectives are to help gain a deep understanding of earnings quality and facilitate the development of comprehensive, granular, and contextual earnings quality indicators and analyses. While there are...

We introduce a new, market-based and forward looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country's U.S. dollar debt and an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions,...

Intangible-intensive firms in the U.S. hold an enormous amount of liquid assets that are in fact short-term debts issued by financial intermediaries. This paper builds a macro-finance model that captures this structure. A self-perpetuating savings glut emerges in equilibrium. As intangibles...

We prove that the use of the risk-adjusted rate (RAR) for compounding and discounting outflows conflicts irremediably with risk aversion. It is correct for inflows. Our correction respects the impact of risk on outflows; it conforms to risk aversion. It solves many unsolved issues. Our examples...

We develop a tractable continuous-time consumption-savings model for a liquidity-constrained agent who faces both permanent and transitory income shocks under incomplete markets. We derive an explicitly-solved consumption function and show that the marginal (certainty equivalent) value of...