Measures of firm performance and concentration: Stylized facts and a dilemma of data reproduction
研究发现，基于美国上市公司数据，过去几十年投资资本回报率（ROIC）集中度上升的结论难以用标准会计数据复现，且数据筛选可能丢弃超过75%的样本，影响经济结论。
Economists and policymakers have used the increase in the concentration of return on invested capital (ROIC) in publicly traded US firms over the last decades as evidence for the decline of competitiveness in the broader economy. Principle support for this claim is a graph presented by the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA, 2016) that reproduces data from the McKinsey and Company’s book on Corporate Valuation. We demonstrate that the key findings associated with the evolution of the ROIC cannot be broadly reproduced using Compustat data and established accounting measures and calculations. Further, we find the recommended data filtering strategies can result in discarding more than 75% of the available data. We show that using the full information dataset can lead to significant changes in economic conclusions. We advocate for transparency in calculations and rationalization of data pre-processing.