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...

The internal rate of return (IRR) is a widely used benchmark for assessing the reliability of the accounting rate of return (ROA) as a measure of economic profitability. We turn this reasoning process on its head by demonstrating that a suitable (weighted average) aggregation of ROAs better...

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...

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...

This note deals with the simplified case of a principal (e.g., a firm's board of directors) which delegates execution of an economic activity to a business unit (or a subsidiary firm) managed by a manager. It is assumed that the manager has no control over the cash flows injected into the unit...

Counterfactual conditionals are cognitive tools that we incessantly use during our lives for judgments, evaluations, decisions. Counterfactuals are used for defining concepts as well; an instance of this is attested by the notions of opportunity cost and excess profit (residual income), two...