Doug: > There are capital stock estimates from the BEA, > compiled on the perpetual inventory method (basically > the cumulative sum of investment less depreciation - > it's not based on a census of the K stock).
That means you still need to know the asset values in one way or another. Otherwise, you wouldn't know how to depreciate them. Depreciation expense also influences the net income as far as I know. So in the presence of differences in the treatment of inventories and assets, there should be differences between IRS income and GAAP income even when there are no accounting problems. How significant are these differences? Also, do you know what kind of information they use in their compilation of the capital stock estimates? Put differently, where do they get that information from? Best, Sabri.
