私营和公共企业的回报率

Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.ISSN 1936-2854 (Print) Rates of return on private and public businesses Jesse Bricker, Kevin B. Moore, Alice H. Volz Please cite this paper as:Bricker, Jesse, Kevin B. Moore, and Alice H. Volz (2025). “Rates of return on private andpublic businesses,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2025-107. Washington: Board NOTE: Staff working papers in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS) are preliminarymaterials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment.The analysis and conclusions set forthare those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or the Rates of return on private and public businesses Jesse Bricker†, Kevin MooreNovember 25, 2025 Abstract Privately owned business assets are an important source of wealth for familiesacross the world, but measurement issues are believed to hamper our understanding ofthese firms. We use income and valuations of private firms in the Survey of ConsumerFinances (SCF), first validating the data against external aggregates and then using 1Introduction Privately owned business assets are among the largest assets for wealthy families in theUnited States (Smith et al. (2023); Bricker et al. (2021)) and across the world (Fagerenget al. (2020); Bach et al. (2020b)). In the United States, the economic size of these private nontraded firms is about equal to the economic size of publicly traded corporate firms(see Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) for valuations, or Campbell and Robbins(2025) for aggregate sales). Private firms should carry a rate of return premium becauseof their relative illiquidity, their lack of diversification within the household portfolio, and In this paper, we return to owner-reported values of income and wealth from privatelyheld businesses in the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to re-estimate and update rates of return for private firms, as in Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) and Kartashova(2014). The SCF data have clear benefits: business income and wealth are measured in-dependently in the SCF for the same firms, in contrast to efforts that use income tax data Due to inherent difficulty in measurement, the starting point for many researchers is tobe skeptical of private business wealth and income data reported in survey data. Giventhis uncertainty, we begin with basic checks of the data quality: comparing aggregate net different from each other, even at granular levels of business organization (figures 1 and2). Further, recent work has shown that SCF valuations are similar to those of transactedbusinesses—again, even by business organization level Campbell and Robbins (2025)— Next, using SCF income and valuation data, we update and extend the work of Moskowitzand Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) and Kartashova (2014) using a rate of return estimationstrategy proposed in Bhandari et al. (2020b). Rates of return under this new method largely confirm the previous results in Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) and Kartashova We then extend the analysis to include the years since the Financial Crisis. In trien-nial estimates in the 2010-2022 period, returns to private firms lag returns to public firms(figure 5), providing support for the original “private equity puzzle”. Over the full time Reliable data on private firms has typically been difficult to find. While regular incomedeclarations from public firms help facilitate public stock exchanges, private firms do notneed to file regular public disclosures and rarely transact. Reporting incentives and lackof third-party verification appears to lead private firms to underreport income to the UStax authority (Guyton et al. (2021); GAO (2015); Johns and Slemrod (2010)); as a result, NIPA assumes business income reported to the IRS is 18-50% underreported (depending has often been found in the SCF survey data (Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002),Kartashova (2014), Cagetti and De Nardi (2006)). Recently, Bhandari et al. (2020b) leveraged data on transacted private firms from Pratt’sStats—now DealStats—and the IRS Integrated Business Database (IBD) to argue thatSCF business income is overstated and that valuations are too low.As a consequence,central questions in public finance may need to be revisited—including rates of return While acknowledging the inherent uncertainty around data on private firms—many ofwhich are private precisely to shield their owners and maintain opacity—we argue here that SCF data on private firms align with external data.One uncertainty to confront iswhat income concept to use to evaluate data quality and measure business returns.1 TheSCF questionnaire asks respondents to report the “net income” of their business. In theIBD, there are two possible net incomes—one that excludes all net income except profits(or “ordinary business income”), and another that includes profits plus other sources of Without a market for trading shares, private businesse