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...

In both finance and accounting, the Return On Equity (ROE) is considered a biased indicator of economic profitability. Opposing this view, this paper shows that an appropriate mean of ROEs signals shareholder value creation. This implies that the notion of Market Value Added may be replaced by...

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

This paper presents a theoretical framework for valuation, investment decisions, and performance measurement based on a nonstandard theory of residual income. It is derived from the notion of “unrecovered” capital, which is here named “lost” capital because it represents the capital...

This paper shows that the Internal-Rate-of-Return (IRR) approach is unreliable, and that the recently introduced Average-Internal-Rate-of-Return (AIRR) model constitutes the basis for an alternative theoretical paradigm of rate of return. To this end, we divide the paper into two parts: a pars...

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 analyzes the relations among different concepts such as earnings, profit, interest, rate, consumption, dividend, installment, cash flow, capital. It aims at embracing these notions in a unique conceptual 'umbrella,' consisting of five perspectives: (1) accounting, (2) economic theory,...

This paper proposes a method for evaluating a project under certainty by means of a systemic outlook, which borrows from accounting the way of representing economic facts while replacing accounting values with cash values. The investor's net worth is regarded as a system whose structure changes...

Two measures of excess profit (residual income) are currently available in the literature: the standard one, of which Economic Value Added (EVA) (Stewart, 1991) is a major instantiation, and Systemic Value Added (SVA) (Magni, 2003, 2004, 2005), also named lost-capital residual income (Magni,...

This paper deals with the problem of modelling in a formal way the concept of excess profit, also known as residual income. A common idea is that excess profit is an unequivocal concept, being the difference between profit and costs, where all types of costs are taken into account, included the...