We empirically examine the profitability of leading Chinese firms, benchmarked against comparable US firms, for the period 2005-13. Return on invested capital (ROIC), which excludes leverage effects on performance, provides the primary metric. Averaged over firms and years, the two sets of firms...

The paper discusses two issues related to “growth”. Both have arguably not been dealt with adequately in the literature. The first concerns growth and accruals. Research practice combines two components of accruals, asset accruals and liability accruals. This simplification causes problems...