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Return on Capital (ROC), Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) and Return on Equity (ROE): Measurement and Implications
Aswath Damodaran
Stern School of Business
July 2007

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ROC, ROIC and ROE: Measurement and Implications
If there has been a shift in corporate finance and valuation in recent years, it has been towards giving “excess returns” a more central role in determining the value of a business. While early valuation models emphasized the relationship between growth and value – higher growth firms were assigned higher values – more recent iterations of these models have noted that growth unaccompanied by excess returns creates no value. With this shift towards excess returns has come an increased focus on measuring and forecasting returns earned by businesses on both investments made in the past and expected future investments. In this paper, we examine accounting and cash flow measures of these returns and how best to forecast these numbers for any given business for the future.

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The notion that the value of a business is a function of its expected cash flows is deeply engrained in finance. To generate these cashflows, though, firms have to raise and invest capital in assets and this capital is not costless. In fact, it is only to the extent that the cash flows exceed the costs of raising capital from both debt and equity that they create value for a business. In effect, the value of a business can be simply stated as a function of the “excess returns” that it generates from both existing and new investments.
While this principle is intuitive and easily proved, measuring excess returns has proved to be difficult to do. On one side of the equation are the costs of debt, equity and capital. While there are clearly significant questions that remain to be addressed, a significant portion of the research in finance has been