Return On Equity, Internal Rate of Return and shareholder value creation

In both finance and accounting the Return On Equity (ROE) is considered a biased indicator of economic profitability. Opposing this view, this paper shows that an appropriate mean of ROEs signals shareholder value creation. This implies that the notion of Market Value Added may be replaced by an average ROE net of the cost of capital. Such a measure does not suffer from problems of existence or uniqueness and may be employed for comparing profitability. The Internal Rate of Return (IRR) itself may be interpreted as the average ROE corresponding to an idealized depreciation system: such an interpretation enables one to solve the multiple-IRR problem and use the IRR for comparing firms’ profitability.