Will the relatively high U.S. stock valuation ratios observed over the past few decades revert, or are they persistent artifacts of fundamental shifts in the U.S. economy? In their January 2026 paper entitled "A Macroeconomic Perspective on Stock Market Valuation Ratios", Andrew Atkeson, Jonathan Heathcote and Fabrizio Perri examine the interplay between economic data (share of labor in corporate output and corporate investment/capital base) and stock market valuation ratios. They derive aggregate U.S. corporate value from the Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts (IMA). Their measure of enterprise value differs from stock market capitalization in two ways:
- It is insensitive to the mix of debt and equity used for firm financing.
- It includes estimated value U.S. subsidiaries of foreign multinationals and excludes estimated value of the foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinationals. Thus, it measures the value of entities filing U.S. corporate tax returns.
Using U.S. economic and corporate valuation data during January 1952 through September 2025, they find that:
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