How can business leaders make better production and capital investment decisions? How can Wall Street analysts improve their predictions of future stock market values? How can government improve macroeconomic forecasts and policies? In The Power of Profit, Anari and Kolari demonstrate how profit measures can be applied as the basis for these and many other applications of economic, policy, financial, and business analysis. The underlying theme of the book is that profitability is the driving force in free market economies. Firms invest in capital, produce goods and services, and generate sales in an effort to reap profits. Firms that are unprofitable exit the marketplace and are replaced by profitable firms. Despite the crucial importance of profits, however, there is no formal model that directly relates profits to capital formation and output. Previous studies over the past 100 years on profit and the economy are mainly descriptive in nature, without any well-specified model grounded in microeconomic theory. Filling this gap, the authors present a profit system model of the firm grounded in basic accounting relationships in addition to the well-known Cobb-Douglas production function, which can be applied to individual firms, industries, and the business sector as a whole.

Through rigorous data analysis, the authors show how the profit system modelcan be applied to:

• modeling the U.S. business sector and national economy
• forecasting output, capital stock, total profit, profit rates, and profit margins
• examining the relationships among profitability, economic growth, and the business cycle
• simulating the effects of potential monetary policy changes on the business sector and national economy
• valuing the Standard & Poor's stock market index as well as individual firms.

The result is a model that integrates microeconomic and macroeconomic factors and that can be widely applied in business and economic decisions, policymaking, research, and teaching.

How can business leaders make better production and capital investment decisions? How can Wall Street analysts improve their predictions of future stock market values? How can government improve macroeconomic forecasts and policies? In The Power of Profit, Anari and Kolari demonstrate how profit measures can be applied as the basis for these and many other applications of economic, policy, financial, and business analysis. The underlying theme of the book is that profitability is the driving force in free market economies. Firms invest in capital, produce goods and services, and generate sales in an effort to reap profits. Firms that are unprofitable exit the marketplace and are replaced by profitable firms. Despite the crucial importance of profits, however, there is no formal model that directly relates profits to capital formation and output. Previous studies over the past 100 years on profit and the economy are mainly descriptive in nature, without any well-specified model grounded in microeconomic theory. Filling this gap, the authors present a profit system model of the firm grounded in basic accounting relationships in addition to the well-known Cobb-Douglas production function, which can be applied to individual firms, industries, and the business sector as a whole. Through rigorous data analysis, the authors show how the profit system modelcan be applied to: modeling the U.S. business sector and national economy forecasting output, capital stock, total profit, profit rates, and profit margins examining the relationships among profitability, economic growth, and the business cycle simulating the effects of potential monetary policy changes on the business sector and national economy valuing the Standard & Poor's stock market index as well as individual firms. The result is a model that integrates microeconomic and macroeconomic factors and that can be widely applied in business and economic decisions, policymaking, research, and teaching.

"The trend is your friend"is a practical principle often used by business managers, who seek to forecast future sales, expenditures, and profitability in order to make production and other operational decisions. The problem is how best to identify and discover business trends and utilize trend information for attaining objectives of firms.This book contains an Excel-based solution to this problem, applying principles of the authors' "profit system model" of the firm that enables forecasts of trends in sales, expenditures, profits and other business variables. The program, called FIRM, which runs on Windows with Microsoft Excel 2010, useshistorical time series of total sales, total costs, and total assets of the firm from its financial statements (income statements and balance sheets), estimates relationships among these variables, and then employs the estimated relationships to forecasts trends in these vital business variables. Featuring step-by-step case examples, the goal is to equip business managers and students with easy-to-use tools for understanding and forecasting trends in important business variables, thereby empowering them to make better business decisions.