Shivaram Rajgopal

2 weeks ago | forbes.com | Shivaram Rajgopal

India makes conglomerates report financial statements of subsidiaries. Why can’t the US follow suit? One of my PhD students was presenting his job market paper, looking at a particular aspect of India’s financial reporting to a well-known accounting group at a top university in the US Midwest. A prominent academic there raised his hand and asked, “why should we care about Indian reporting? It’s a tiny market, after all.

1 month ago | forbes.com | Shivaram Rajgopal

The US government has a massive footprint on any US company that goes way beyond just the impact of tariffs. How the government chooses to use that influence can make or break the company. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”Well, not anymore. The US Government has been a benign partner for most enterprises over the last few decades. That sentiment has arguably changed over the last few months. Enough has been written on the impact of tariffs on US car companies.

2 months ago | forbes.com | Shivaram Rajgopal

Basic research at universities has yielded huge social and financial returns. The cuts and taxes aimed at research universities will hobble them for decades. But universities can do better with reporting on the value they add to society. An institutional bond investor asked me the other day, “How should we think about the moves to tax universities’ endowments and cuts to their funding?” Well, here is my attempt at sketching the tradeoffs in this debate.

2 months ago | forbes.com | Shivaram Rajgopal

Close the annual IRS tax gap of $696 billion, help Department of Defense (DoD) address its significant internal control weaknesses and avoid the 8% proposed defense cut and get the US to recognize its $40 trillion of off-balance sheet unfunded entitlements Let us begin by making the obvious point: there is waste or inefficiency in government, and we need to rationally address this problem. The IMF states that US government spending is around 36% of US GDP. But where should one begin?

2 months ago | forbes.com | Shivaram Rajgopal

Our research suggests that barely 20 states report the governmental assistance they give companies. 80% of firms receiving subsidies worth more than $1 million do not disclose such aid in their 10Ks.It is perhaps well known that Tesla makes a fair amount of money from regulatory carbon credits. Its 2024 10K prominently displays the $2.7 billion of revenue Tesla made from automotive regulatory credits in 2024. This flows almost directly to their operating income (pretax) of $7 billion in 2024.