This paper describes three main risk areas in using return on investment in financial decision making. The paper also shows how to analyze differences between planned and actual size of return on investment and preconditions for using return on investment in financial decision making.

The article is devoted to Frank Donaldson Brown who is author of very frequent used model of decomposition return on investment (assets) and return on equity. First part describes his successful career of manager in E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and General Motors Corporation. Second part...

The paper describes three major types of financial decision making in an enterprise: (a) decision on investment areas, (b) decision on investment financing, (c) decision on profit distribution. All three types of decision are interlinked and must reflect the most important objectives of an...

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...

We evaluate the efficiency of capital deployment for acquiring firms before M&As, defined as the return on invested capital net of the cost of capital, and link this measure to firms' post-acquisition performance. Acquirers with higher, pre-acquisition net returns on investment have superior...

This paper studies financial statement information from the 50 largest international oil and gas companies during 1992 to 2011 and evaluates their relation to market values. In particular, we examine how this relationship is affected by accounting method choice (successful efforts versus full...

This paper studies financial statement information from the 50 largest international oil and gas companies during 1992 to 2011 and evaluates their relation to market values. In particular, we examine how this relationship is affected by accounting method choice (successful efforts versus full...

We study the use of firms' book-to-market ratios (B/M) in value investing and its implications for comovements in firms’ stock returns and trading volumes. We show B/M has become increasingly detached from common alternative valuation ratios over time while also becoming worse at forecasting...

Literature and textbooks on capital budgeting endorse net present value (NPV) and generally treat accounting rates of return as not being reliable tools. This paper shows that accounting numbers can be reconciled with NPV and fruitfully employed in real-life applications. Focusing on project...

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...