An Average-Based Accounting Approach to Capital Asset Investments: The Case of Project Finance

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 finance transactions, an average return on investment (AROI) is drawn from the pro forma financial statements, obtained as the ratio of aggregate income to aggregate book value. We show that such a metric correctly captures a project's economic profitability, as long as it is compared with a comprehensive weighted average cost of capital (WACC) that includes a correction factor that takes account of the capital foregone by the investors. In contrast to the internal rate of return, AROI is unique, and we provide an explicit functional relation that links it to the NPV. The approach holds for levered and unlevered projects, constant and non-constant leverage ratios, and constant and non-constant WACCs.     

Relationships between municipal bond rates,underwriter margins and market yields

Expressions are given relating municipal bond coupon rates to underwrite profit margins and the market yield. These expressions are applied to the examination of net interest rates, net present value and the cost of capital of serial bond issues. The conditions which must be satisfied so that a decrease in net interest rate corresponds to an increase in net present value (hence a decrease in the cost of capital to the issuer) are presented.     

A deterministic profit attribution model: The postal service,a case study

This paper derives a positive model relating changes in profitability to output levels, price, input quantities, and costs. The model involves decomposition of profit changes to define contributions associated with changes in the product market and production input variables. It can be derived from basic profit concepts without additional assumptions regarding the organization's behavioral decisions or about the shapes of the demand or production functions. It therefore avoids all normative underpinnings and is based strictly on measurable changes in the environment. The model is applied to results obtained from the United States Postal Service income statement. Changes in the Service's productivity and its components (e.g., labor, materials, and capital) are fully reconciled in an accounting sense with reported changes in net income. This reconciliation permits the identification of the sources of net income change.     

Market Imperfection and Productivity Growth—Alternative Estimates for Taiwan

This study first explores why the shares of factor inputs have not been measured correctly and concludes that the earlier findings are biased due to the miscalculation of factor shares which have produced low estimated total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the East Asian countries. Second, three approaches are proposed to empirically illustrate the impact of capital and labor shares on the estimates of TFP growth. It is suggested that TFP growth in the East Asian economies will be understated if net indirect taxes and imperfect competition profit are ignored. Finally, by taking the net indirect taxes and imperfect competition profits into account, the result of this paper indicates that Taiwan's economy has enjoyed an average annual TFP growth rate of 3.6% over the period 1980–1999.     

A time series analysis of real wages,consumption and asset returns

This paper re-examines whether the time series properties of aggregate consumption, real wages, and asset returns can be explained by a neoclassical model. Previous empirical rejections of the model have suggested that the optimal labour contract model might be appropriate for understanding the time series properties of the real wage rate and consumption. We show that an optimal contract model restricts the long-run relation of the real wage rate and consumption. We exploit this long-run restriction (cointegration restriction) for estimating and testing the model, using Ogaki and Park's (1989) cointegration approach. This long-run restriction involves a parameter that we call the long-run intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) for non-durable consumption but does not involve the IES for leisure. This allows us to estimate the long-run IES for non-durable consumption from a cointegrating regression. Tests for the null of cointegration do not reject our model. As a further analysis, our estimates of the long-run IES for non-durable consumption are used to estimate the discount factor and a coefficient of time-nonseparability using Hansen's (1982) Generalized Method of Moments. We form a specification test for our model à la Hausman (1978) from these two steps. This specification test does not reject our model. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Marx Means Today

Marx made significant contributions to macroeconomics, laying the grounds for both Keynes's theory of aggregate demand and Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction. His law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall parallels Alvin Hansen's theory of secular stagnation which has recently received much attention among scholars studying the financial crises in Japan, the US and the Eurozone. This article argues that part of the new stagnation does not result from a natural exhaustion of investment possibilities, but from an overly loose central bank monetary policy that keeps zombie banks and their zombie clients alive and blocks the emergence of new start‐up firms.     

Incomplete information and the time series behaviour of consumption

Pischke ( 1995 ) uses both microeconomic and macroeconomic US data to test the idea that, within an otherwise standard PIH framework, ignorance by agents of aggregate labour income can account for the observed degree of excess smoothness and sensitivity in consumption. His tests involve only the second moments of aggregate consumption and labour income. In this paper our main aim is to identify and test the restrictions his model implies for aggregate consumption dynamics, using US quarterly data over the period 1959–1996, but our framework allows us also to test an earlier, related model of Goodfriend ( 1992 ). We find that both models can be formally rejected: ignorance of aggregate labour income cannot by itself account for aggregate consumption dynamics; some other relaxation of the assumptions of the standard PIH is required. We give an example of one possible such relaxation and present evidence indicating that Pischke's version of imperfect information may, within that framework, have a significant role to play. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

提升物流仓储业净利润现金含量的途径

指出净利润现金含量低是制约物流仓储业发展的重要因素之一,提升物流仓储业的净利润现金含量可以通过增加仓储企业经营活动现金净流量和净利润、控制成本费用现金流出等方式得以实现。     

Information Technology and the Organization of Firms

This paper seeks to understand why improved information technology (IT) might strengthen the case for decentralization, as recent empirical work suggests. We study a firm with a headquarters and two managers, each of whom gathers information about her changing local environment. The firm earns a gross profit that depends on actions taken as well as the current local environments. More information permits better actions, and information‐gathering costs drop as IT improves. When the firm is centralized, information‐gathering expenditures are first best, but after the firm decentralizes, each manager becomes a self‐interested player of a “sharing game” in which she collects a share of gross profit and bears the cost of her chosen information‐gathering activities. The firm's actions are determined by the information gathered at the equilibria of the game. As a result, the firm experiences a decentralization penalty, namely the change in net profit (gross profit minus informational costs) after decentralizing. If the penalty is small, then it is outweighed by the advantages of decentralizing—the vanishing of monitoring costs and perhaps the improved motivation of a decentralized manager's staff. To gather information a manager chooses (once and for all) a partitioning of her possible local environments and then searches to find the set in which her current environment lies. Our main measure of a manager's information cost is a technology parameter, θ, times the number of sets in her chosen partitioning. A second measure is θ times the partitioning's “Shannon content,” which may be interpreted as average search time when search is efficient. We ask whether improved IT, i.e., a drop in θ, indeed lowers the decentralization penalty. We obtain a strongly affirmative answer to this question for both cost measures in a class of examples and a mixed answer when we generalize so as to preserve some of the key properties of those examples. In a parallel manner we explore another conjecture suggested in the empirical literature, namely that better IT raises the coordination benefit, which we define as the increase in net profit when the firm bases its actions on pooled information, rather than letting each action variable depend on the information gathered by just one manager.     

The strategic use of managerial incentives in a non‐profit firm mixed duopoly

A mixed duopoly setting is examined where a private non‐profit firm (NPO) competes with a private profit‐maximizer. The NPO's stakeholders select a contract for their managers. A novel NPO objective function is utilized which takes into account all the likely returns to the NPO's stakeholders (NPO profits and the surplus accruing to the NPO stakeholders) in such a commercial setting. In sub‐game perfect equilibria, it is shown that the NPO's managers generally will not be given the NPO's true objective to optimize. It is also shown that aggregate social welfare may increase or decrease due to this managerial contracting behavior or the use of NPO membership fees. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Asset specificity,capital intensity and capital structure: An empirical test

Capital investment and capital financing decisions interact. To resolve current controversies in investment-leverage-growth relationships requires an integrated industrial organization/financial economics empirical model of profit margins, capital investment intensity, leverage and risk. Using cumulative future losses in discontinued operations to measure the asset specificity of the firm's investments, empiricai results support a complementary (positive) relationship between debt and investment, the debt financing of verifiable contemporaneous growth, equity financing of future growth and the debt financing of specific assets. This evidence rejects the transactions cost theory of capital structure in Fortune 500 firms.     

Age-dependent investing: Optimal funding and investment strategies in defined contribution pension plans when members are rational life cycle financial planners

A defined contribution pension plan allows consumption to be redistributed from the plan member's working life to retirement in a manner that is consistent with the member's personal preferences. The plan's optimal funding and investment strategies therefore depend on the desired profile of consumption over the lifetime of the member. We investigate these strategies under the assumption that the member is a rational life cycle financial planner and has an Epstein–Zin utility function, which allows a separation between risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. We also take into account the member's human capital during the accumulation phase of the plan and we allow the annuitisation decision to be endogenously determined during the decumulation phase.We show that the optimal funding strategy involves a contribution rate that is not constant over the life of the plan but is age-dependent and reflects the trade-off between the desire for current versus future consumption, the desire for stable consumption over time, the member's attitude to risk, and changes in the level of human capital over the life cycle. We also show that the optimal investment strategy during the accumulation phase of the plan is ‘stochastic lifestyling’, with an initial high weight in equity-type investments and a gradual switch into bond-type investments as the retirement date approaches in a way that depends on the realised outcomes for the stochastic processes driving the state variables. The optimal investment strategy during the decumulation phase of the plan is to exchange the bonds held at retirement for life annuities and then to gradually sell the remaining equities and buy more annuities, i.e., a strategy known as ‘phased annuitisation’.     

Bank lending rules for managing sovereign risk

A simple domestic lending rule is one that ensures that the loan rate exceeds the bank's cost of capital and the borrower's expected cashflows exceed the terminal value of the loan. Because a sovereign loan is not collateralized and lacks recourse, the domestic lending rule is not adequate for making sovereign lending decisions. Three modifications are suggested. First, the sovereign borrower's time preference for consumption needs to be considered. Second, the domestic borrower's decision to default voluntarily is made after observing the value of the collateral whereas the sovereign borrower's decision is made after observing earnings. In this paper, the sovereign borrower upgrades expectations in a Bayesian manner. Although no lending rule will completely prevent a default, the probability of default can be managed leading to a third modification.     

Price uncertainty and the effect of capital costs in a point in-point out inventory investment

This paper analyzes a point in-point out inventory investment under price uncertainty. The optimal quantity is determined by maximizing the expected value of the investor's risk preference function, which is a function of profit. Using an exponential risk preference function, the adjustment in the optimal quantity stemming from a change in the interest rate is investigated. The main conclusion is that the sign of the adjustment depends both on how profit is expressed and on the type of price distribution applied. Contrary to what is assumed in conventional managerial control practices, a rise in the interest rate might lead to an increase in the optimal quantity when present value serves as a measure of profit.     

通货膨胀、财富波动对利润率的影响——利润率是上升还是下降？

从价格角度构建利润率公式,并证明了通货膨胀可以提高利润率。进一步分析发现,通货膨胀是资本保持与提高剩余价值的重要方式,然而利润率的实现并不容易,金融创新通过债务创造的模式改善了利润率的实现路径,减缓了利润率的下降,维持了经济繁荣。但这会推动企业与私人的债务相对过量,金融创新在推动财富（债务）增长的同时,也扩大了贫富差距。而财富的增长又需要更高的利润率支撑,这就减缓了资本的积累,强化了财富与利润率的双向波动,使得经济与金融危机更容易发生。另外,利润率也可以作为解释各种类型通货膨胀的基础理论。     

中国行业层面研究与试验发展资本存量核算

研究目标：测算中国八大行业门类研究与试验发展（Research and Development,R&D）资本存量。研究方法：基于SNA2008的GDP核算框架,厘清R&D支出的资本化核算框架;再利用美国BEA方法测算R&D资本存量。研究发现：1990~2015年,中国R&D资本存量不到美国R&D资本存量的1/4;然而,自1994年后,中国R&D资本存量年均增长率达24.79%,而美国仅为4.86%,中美两国R&D资本存量差距呈逐渐缩小趋势;制造业R&D资本存量占全国R&D资本存量的比例呈上升趋势,从1990年的17.41%增长到2015年的68.08%,这与中国加快制造业转型升级的事实相符。研究创新：给出完整的R&D支出资本化核算过程,首次测算中国八大行业门类的R&D资本存量。研究价值：为分析技术进步对经济增长的影响提供了行业层面R&D投资和资本存量数据序列。     

Production theory with profit-constrained revenue-maximization: The duality approach

This paper derives a general version of Baumol's production theory, where the main behavioral assumption is ‘revenue maximization subject to a profit constraint’ instead of ‘profit maximization’. This theory turns out to be analogous to the neoclassical (competitive) production and consumption theories. Employing the fruitful duality approach it is presented here in a unified and very economical form that provides a complete and general analysis of the comparative static behavior of Baumol's firm.     

Growing through the merger and acquisition

The paper studies with an endogenous growth model how the merger and acquisition (M&A) affects the aggregate growth rate. We model the M&A as a capital reallocation process, which can increase both productivity and growth rates of firms. The model is tractable and greatly consistent with patterns observed in the M&A at the micro level. Matching our model to the data, we find that prohibiting the M&A would lead to the reduction of the aggregate growth rate of US economy by 0.1% and the reduction of the aggregate TFP by 5%.     

Responsibility accounting and asymmetry of information

This paper uses the principal-agent model to show that a manager's optimal compensation should generally include non-controllable factors of production such as the firm's investment in capital. This implies that the managerial accounting distinction between profit and investment centres is artificial. Examples are shown in which the ROI or RI criteria could be optimal for compensating managers implying that the optimal compensation criterion is very much specific to the firm's production and risk parameters. Thus, the debate about which criterion is more appropriate is vacuous.     

Roles of Public Capital in Pakistan's Economy: Productivity, Investment and Growth Analysis

This study analyzes the role of public capital in Pakistan's economy, tracing the relationship between productivity of public capital and economic growth. We estimate a production function, with public capital as an inputs. The results indicate that the productivity (output elasticity) of aggregate as well as different components of public capital are sufficiently high. We also analyze substitutability and complementarity between public and private capital by estimating investment functions, revealing that public capital has worked as a substitute for private investment. The net effect of public capital on the national economy is analyzed by estimating reduced forms, with the result that public capital has a positive net effect on national product. The growth analysis shows that the contribution of public capital is declining over time.