Day: September 7, 2025

Corporate earnings are the amount of money a publicly traded company makes during a period. These reports are required by regulatory authorities like the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, and investors, traders, and news headlines all rely on them to determine how well or poorly a company is doing.

Earnings per share, or EPS, is the portion of net income allocated to each outstanding share, offering insight into per-share profitability. A refined calculation accounts for stock options, warrants, and convertible debt that could increase the share count, allowing you to compare a company’s profitability with its peers.

While this might sound technical, it is one of the most critical concepts in understanding business performance, stock prices, and long-term investing. EPS allows you to see how efficiently a company uses its assets to generate revenue, which can then be used for investments and growth initiatives. In contrast, a company with low EPS may be spending too much on overhead or not investing in its future.

Earnings reports also allow you to gauge a company’s financial health by comparing its retained earnings with its dividend payouts. High retained earnings indicate a focus on reinvestment, while low retained earnings suggest a preference for paying out to shareholders. You can also look at the trend in a company’s retained earnings to see how consistently it has been growing. This can indicate a healthy balance between investment and dividends, as well as a stable and predictable cash flow.

At times, the United States has sought to remove foreign governments from power in pursuit of its national interests. These covert regime change efforts often failed to achieve their basic purposes and sparked blowback that worsened relations with the United States.

There is now a growing scholarly consensus that regime change rarely achieves its desired goals and often produces deleterious side effects. These include a higher probability of civil war, increased human rights violations, and dragging the foreign intervener into lengthy nation-building projects. Yet some policymakers continue to advocate for forcible regime change. These officials are often guided by cognitive biases that lead them to focus on the desirability of the desired goals and ignore the full resources required to achieve them.

These political, economic, and military factors can help explain why regime change is so hard to execute. Our article demonstrates that a key reason is the presence of strategic uncertainty. Citizens observe heterogeneous signals about the relationship between democracy and growth and then choose regimes to maximize their survival probabilities. These choices are biased by information asymmetry, coordination considerations, and screen- ing.

Our analysis also suggests that a lack of political will can further limit the success of regime change. It can be difficult for leaders to commit armed forces to the cause of democracy if they believe that their government will face serious repercussions from international bodies such as the International Criminal Court. In addition, forcibly removing a foreign leader would likely violate the international law principle of self-defence and would strike at the core of State sovereignty protected by the UN Charter.