The author discusses the effects of inflation on the income of public utilities. He gives an introduction to the scenario of measuring corporate income following the inflation resulting from the world wars. He makes an attempt to measure the amount of the overstatement of income for the electric utility industry and fourteen individual companies. In studying the electric utility industry, he illustrates the adjustments made to depreciation charges in Table 1. He discusses over-statement of income and decrease in the real income of electrical utilities after converting them into dollars, using Table 2. He then enumerates the factors which give rise to the margin of error in assessing income. He explains the procedures followed in studying fourteen individual companies in face of certain defects in the study of the electrical utility industry. In Table 3, the author presents confirmation to the conclusions indicated in the study of the electrical utility industry, and a comparison of the operating adjusted income author shows that the results of the years 1940 and 1953, in Table 4, while in Table 5, the depreciation adjustment is not proportional to the depreciation charge. He presents a comparison between public utilities and other industries.

Reviews the book "Elementary Statistics," by R. Clay Sprowls.

Harold Bierman, Jr., Valuation of Safe Harbor Tax Benefit Transfer Leases: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 38, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings Forty-First Annual Meeting American Finance Association New York, N.Y. December 28-30, 1982 (May, 1983), pp. 611-612

Debt accounting, Liquidity, Uncertainty, Present value of Debt

The article considers how the choice of the method of write-off and investment tax credit affect the investment decisions of firms in the United States. There is a general agreement that the income tax policies of the federal government influence the type and the levels of investments made by corporations, subject to income tax. With no tax deduction the investor is indifferent between the long-and short-lived investments since they have equal present values. Balancing the possibility of misinterpretation is the fact that assuming there is a present tax liability there is less risk in a tax credit, or an immediate write-off, than with depreciation write-offs that require profitable operations in the future for the write-offs to be of value. One objective of this paper has been to question some of the conclusions of previous authors writing on the subject of depreciation, taxes and incentives to invest. To accomplish this objective accountants need to understand more completely the effects of the different possible tax provisions on the measures used by the businessman to make his decisions, and the effects on his attitudes towards making investments.

All the stock price models discussed in this paper are based on the assumption that the present value of a share of common stock is equal to the discounted value of all future expected dividends accruing to the stockholder:where Po : current value of a share of common stock, Dt: dividend expected to be received at end of period t, k : investor's discount or time-value rate, andt : time.