Calcbench

In our latest Q&A interview with people who use Calcbench in their financial analysis, we speak with Stephen O’Byrne, President of Shareholder Value Advisors . O’Byrne’s firm helps companies design better management incentive plans and measure shareholder value at the group and divisional levels using economic profit concepts.  In this interview, Calcbench talks to O’Byrne about why investors should focus on executive compensation, how to evaluate executive pay with the new disclosures, and how Calcbench can help investors with this analysis.  Let’s start at the top. Why should investors pay attention to executive compensation?  Simple: because when pay practices are connected with shareholder interests, investors have a better chance of achieving higher returns. So investors should study executive compensation to be sure that alignment between pay and shareholder interests does exist. How has executive compensation been evolving?  Proxy advisers have become incr...

Calcbench is used by academics around the world. Typically academics have used our platform for teaching   or   for research — but lately, we increasingly come across examples of academics who use Calcbench for both. Recently, we had the pleasure of talking with Anne Beatty, who uses the Calcbench platform in her advanced accounting course at Ohio State University and also incorporates Calcbench data into her research projects. Below are excerpts from our conversation.  Why do you use Calcbench?  Calcbench is super handy in class for one-off examples. Calcbench is also available to me to research what I teach in class, in a “big sample” way.  For the advanced accounting class that I teach, I rely heavily on information that’s embedded in the footnotes of the financial statements. I show live examples in the classroom. Currently my students do not pull data from Calcbench as part of their assignments, although I may ask students to do so in the fall. One of the t...