An expository note on depreciation and profitability under rate-of-return regulation

This note provides a simple, general proof that if a regulated firm is allowed to earn its actual (nominal) one-period cost of capital on the depreciated original cost of its investments, and if actual earnings equal allowed earnings, then the net present value of all investments is zero for any method of computing depreciation. Some implications and extensions of this Invariance Proposition are discussed.     

Shephard's lemma and rate of return regulation

By counter example this paper shows that in general, Shephard's lemma cannot be used for the usual formulation of the rate of return regulated cost function. A solution to the problem is supplied.     

The rate of imitation,learning and profitability

A mean variance model of technique choice is incorporated with Bayesian learning to generate a theory of inter-firm technological diffusion. The determinants of the diffusion speed are investigated.     

Depreciation Provisions and Investment Incentives under Full Imputation

This paper examines how the Australian full imputation and capital gains tax provisions can combine to influence incentives to invest by affecting the cost of capital. Costs of capital for both unincorporated enterprises and widely held, Australian-owned companies are examined under idealized depreciation provisions. The paper also presents numerical estimates of costs of capital under actual Australian depreciation provisions.     

The effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return

This paper presents new estimates of the taxes paid on nonfinancial corporate capital, on the pretax rate of return to capital, and on the effective tax rate. The basic time series show that both the pretax rate of return and the effective tax rate have varied substantially in the past quarter century.An explicit analysis indicates that, after adjusting for different aspects of the business cycle, pretax profitability was between one and 1.5 percentage points lower in the 1970s than in the 1960s. The rate of profitability in the 1960s was also about one-half of a percentage point greater than the profitability in the 7 years of the 1950s after the Korean war.Changes in productivity growth, in inflation, in relative unit labor costs, and in other variables are all associated with changes in profitability. None of these variables, however, can explain the differences in profitability between the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.Looking at broad decade averages, the effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return move in opposite directions, lower pretax profits occuring when the tax rate is high. There thus appears to have been no tendency for pretax profits to vary in a way that offsets differences in effective tax rates.     

Re-assessing international stock return predictability: evidence from directional accuracy and excess profitability tests

In this article, we assess the informational content of monthly lagged US excess stock returns for sign and mean predictability of stock market returns in 10 industrialized countries using the directional accuracy and excess profitability tests of Pesaran and Timmermann (1992) and Anatolyev and Gerko (2005), respectively. We find only a limited evidence supporting the earlier findings of Rapach et al. (2013) based on the test of Clark and West (2007).     

Environmental regulation and profitability: An application to Swedish pulp and paper mills

In this paper we analyze the impact on firm profits of the environmental regulations in the Swedish pulp and paper industry. The approach taken is a non-parametric programming model of the technology. A feature of this industry is that environmental regulations are determined individually for each mill. A question, then, is if these individual regulations have a similar impact on firm profits. The approach in this paper allows us to calculate both the regulated and unregulated profits, which means that the severity of the regulations, in terms of foregone profits, can be calculated for each mill. The empirical result shows that the impact on the mills varies substantially, and that the burden from the regulations is less severe in 1990 than in 1989.     

Guaranteed return regulation: a case study of regulation of water in California

Price cap regulation (PCR) arose out of dissatisfaction with rate-of-return regulation (ROR). In energy and water there has been a move away from PCR into an extended form of ROR, referred to as guaranteed return regulation (GRR). It is employed to implement policies that legislators are unwilling to apply by transparent methods, namely taxation, but willing to apply opaquely through the regulatory process. GRR does not promote efficiency and, as the California experience shows, the guarantees it provides are limited. Its success in California has been mixed and it should be considered to be a work in progress and open to improvements, some of which are outlined.     

Measuring bank competition under binding interest rate regulation: the case of China

Many empirical studies suggest that financial reform promoted bank competition in most mature and emerging economies. However, some earlier studies that adopted conventional approaches to measure competition have concluded that bank competition in China declined during the past decade, despite progressive reforms implemented since the 1980s. We show that this apparent contradiction is the result of flawed measurement. Conventional indicators such as the Lerner index and Panzar–Rosse H-statistic fail to measure competition in Chinese loan markets properly due to the system of interest rate regulation. By contrast, the profit elasticity (PE) approach does not suffer from these shortcomings. Using balance sheet information for a large sample of banks operating in China during 1996–2008, we show that competition actually increased in the past decade when the PE indicator is used.     

The nominal rate of interest, the rate of return on money, and inflationary expectations

This paper offers two modifications to the standard comparative-static analysis that help explain why nominal interest rates may either over- or under-adjust to a change in inflationary expectations, even in full general equilibrium: the inclusion of the real rate of return to money balances in commodity demand functions, and the presence of differing costs of obtaining information. In brief, the first factor may explain why nominal interest rates could over-adjust to a change in inflationary expectations, while the second may substitute for real balance effects in limiting the upward adjustment of nominal rates.     

The profitability of U.K. foreign direct investment under colonialism

The effects of discrimination in favor of metropolitan direct investment in colonies on the size and composition of foreign investment there and the profits accruing therefrom have been derived with the help of a simple model. Empirical studies show that the rate of return to U.K. investment in her colonies was significantly higher than in non-British LDCs, although some doubt remains as to the extent to which this result is explained by data imperfections.     

Television advertising and profitability

To date, economists have largely ignored the possibility that various advertising media may have differential impacts on firm performance. Here an empirical analysis reveals that television advertising has a significantly greater positive impact on firm profitability than does advertising in general.     

Depreciation and the conservation of energy

It is argued that accelerating the rate at which firms can depreciate existing capital can move forward the date at which they will switch to more energy efficient processes. The price effect of inelastic industrial demand for energy might thereby be muted.     

Copy-protection policies and profitability

This paper examines the publisher's optimal copy-protection policies. Even if copying is more cost-efficient than producing an original, private copying harms the publisher for two reasons. First, the copy users’ contribution to the original's price is too small, and second, there is a time lag between providing the original and distributing copies. If and only if both production costs of copies and institutional costs of the distribution of copies are sufficiently small; does controlling the number of copies benefit the publisher. However, the publisher's optimal number of copies is too low from a social welfare perspective.     

The relationship between risk and rate of return on capital in UK industry

Quarterly data from the International Finance Statistics of the international Monetary Fund is used to test the long-run implications of the neoclassical stochastic growth model for ten OECD countires – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom and the united States. In doing so, Johasen's maximum likelihood approach for estimating and testing long-run stedy-state relations in multivariate vector autoregressive models is used (Johansen, S. (1988) Statistical analysis of cointegration vectors. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 231 –54).     

Investment under uncertainty: The nature of demand shocks and the expected profitability of capital

This paper analyses the disparity regarding the sign of the investment-uncertainty relationship in models of investment under symmetric adjustment costs. That sign is determined by the shape of the profit function, which is related to the nature of demand shocks.     

Markets and regulation under uncertainty

Unlike many comparisons of control strategies under uncertainty, this letter will report that, in some cases, optimality can be achieved ex ante if specific andad valorem taxes are imposed upon a functioning market with externalities.     

The economic rate of return of infrastructures and regional policy in the European Union

This paper examines the results of cost–benefit analysis (CBA) of 200 major investment projects co-financed in 1988–93 by the European Commission. The project database we have built is probably one of the few existing sets of comparable micro-data on the expected rates of return of public infrastructure and on the quality of CBA leading to its calculation. The database reveals a striking dispersion of expected rates of return around the average. Part of the large sample variance is probably a consequence more of inconsistencies in the actual implementation of CBA than of structural differences among the European Union's more economically backward regions. We offer a measurement of the quality of CBA and compare EU ex-ante data with World Bank ex-post data.