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Journal Article
Recent revisions to corporate profits: what we know and when we knew it
Initial estimates in the National Income and Product Accounts significantly overstated U.S. corporate profits for the 1998-2000 period. Subsequent revisions reveal that the profitability of the nation's corporate sector in the late 1990s was substantially weaker than "real-time" data indicated. An unexpected surge in employee stock options exercised-and perhaps, in some sectors, firms' inflated statements of profit-may help explain the large downward revisions.