Die Eigenkapitalrentabilität deutscher Industrieaktiengesellschaften 1925–1929

Abstract In historical works, one likes to argue with profits or gains. Corporate profits also play a central role in Knut Borchardt’s well-regarded thesis that the economy in the middle phase of the Weimar Republic could be described as an «abnormal, in fact sick, economy» and therefore problems had accumulated that were extraordinarily significant on the long run in the collapse of Germany’s first democracy. According to this view, excessive wages in particular have caused a compression of those incomes that normally finance investment. A verification of this profit compression thesis is not possible with only commercial balance sheets, as these are considered unreliable due to the large entrepreneurial discretion involved in balance sheet preparation. The situation is different with tax balance sheets: tax law severely restricts the scope for discretion in balance sheet preparation, and tax balance sheets have been subject to scrutiny by the tax authorities since 1925. Therefore, tax balance sheets are considered as a very reliable basis for return calculations. By using all surviving tax balance sheets, Mark Spoerer has presented a study of the return on equity of industrial stock corporations for the years 1925 to 1941. For the years from 1925 to 1929, he concludes that in the «Golden Twenties» the return on equity of industrial stock corporations could not have been more than two to a maximum of five percent. He claims that through his work the profit compression thesis has been empirically verified. So far, there has been no critical examination of this work. The aim of this paper is to make up for this. It is shown that the surviving balance sheets do not allow conclusions to be drawn about the profitability of all industrial joint-stock corporations. On the other hand, it is shown that some tax balance sheets of very large companies, which have been included with a high degree of weight in the calculation of returns, contain considerable errors. In addition, some companies have used special tax rules to transfer the expense of future or previous periods to the years 1925 to 1929. Both – the erroneous accounting and the special tax rules – result in significant understatements of profits in the surviving tax balance sheets. Consequently, the calculated returns cannot be correct. Finally, an outlook is given on the consequences of the results of this paper for the use of tax balance sheets.