This paper studies accrual accounting and equity valuation in the context of a firm that makes repeated and overlapping investments in productive capacity. The analysis identifies a particular accrual accounting (depreciation) rule which is termed replacement cost accounting because the book value of existing capacity assets is set equal to the value that such assets would have if a competitive...

To test how practice interruptions affect worker productivity, we estimate how temporal breaks affect surgeons' performance of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Examining 188 surgeons who performed 56,315 CABG surgeries in Pennsylvania between 2006 and 2010, we find that a surgeon's additional day away from the operating room raised patients' inpatient mortality by up to 0.067 percentage ...

The economic accuracy of accrual-based managerial performance measures is most essential for value added investment decisions in decentralised firms. Contemporary EVA-literature often lends support to annuity-based depreciation schedules for accomplishing congruence between capital budgeting criteria, like NPV, and accounting measures, like ROI and RI. This is incongruent with the principal age...

Extending the wealth accumulation model of Piketty and Zucman [2014] to include net depreciation in fossil fuels, minerals, and forests produces two key indicators: the net national saving rate adjusted for natural capital depreciation, and the ratio of this rate to long-run growth. These indicators are applied to eight rich economies over 1970–2013 and developing countries for 1979–2013. Where...

Eugene Fama (1984) analyzed the variability and the covariation of risk premiums and expected rates of depreciation. We employ three statistical techniques that do not suffer from a potential bias in Fama’s analysis, but we nevertheless confirm his findings. In contrast to his interpretation the results are not necessarily at variance with the predictions of a theoretical model of the risk prem...

This paper extends Frank’s (2006) very simple model to analyze the welfare effects of appreciation and depreciation in a world with borrowing, property taxes, and moving costs. It is shown that appreciation can make homeowners worse off but that even when there is a property tax depreciation can not make homeowners who intend to stay in their house worse off. Our model provides a simple framewo...

We study the Markov equilibria of a model of free riding in which n infinitely lived agents choose between private consumption and irreversible contributions to a durable public good. We show that the set of equilibrium steady states converges to a unique point as depreciation converges to zero. For any level of depreciation, moreover, the highest steady state converges to the efficient level a...

Estimating manufacturing costs of a new product or process soon after research and development (R&D) has commenced can provide a good indication of the project’s economic viability. “Early” estimates can be used to direct research efforts to promising opportunities for cost reduction, and allow businesses to better assign resources to new products. Although potentially compromised because some ...