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...

Previous literature on earnings management has examined the maintained hypothesis that firms barely beating earnings benchmarks are earnings manipulators with earnings before accounting manipulation otherwise slightly below their benchmarks and has implemented research designs that treat all...

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...

Firm Profitability - Does it really matter for shareholder return or ROE (return on equity)? Does this question sound oxymoron and antithetic? Not really. On the contrary, evidence has surfaced that Returns on equity - based on the shareholders' equity accounted in the balance sheet - is not...

We propose the standard neoclassical model of investment under uncertainty with short-run adjustment frictions as a benchmark for earnings-return patterns absent accounting influences. We show that our proposed benchmark generates a wide range of earnings-return patterns documented in accounting...

We ask whether the quality of internal information matters for investment decisions. We predict that investment is more sensitive to internal profit signals and less sensitive to external price signals when managers have higher quality internal information. Consistent with recent theoretical and...

This study examines the impact of climate change on firm earnings, and how well managers anticipate the impact. Exploiting regional temperature variation around corporate headquarters, we find that firms' earnings, on average, are negatively impacted by an unusually warm climate. In economic...

This study investigates the effect of real earnings management on two important aspects of earnings quality: earnings persistence and its informativeness about future cash flows. I focus on real earnings management through the abnormal reduction in discretionary expenditures and investigate how...

A comprehensive mathematical treatment of the profit elasticity measure of the degree of operating leverage {with special emphasis on the operating break-even point (s)} considering linear and non-linear revenue functions and non-linear (operating) cost functions {yielding non-linear (operating)...

Price Earnings- and Market Book-ratios presume a systematic link between financial statement data and company value. We analyze this relationship in a steady state model with overlapping capacity investments where company value is inferred from a constant growth residual income model. We...