A paper published in the Harvard Business Review points out a new way to calculate economic profit that could be more appropriate for service firms and other people-intensive companies. Instead of focusing on investment and return on investment, the focus is on employee productivity, in terms of both generating revenues and reducing costs. The approach is to first determine economic profit in the conventional way, except that we ignore taxes, so that economic profit is before tax, as follows: = Economic profit Operating profit - Capital charge Assume the following information for a hotel chain that wishes to adopt the new method. The firm has $100 million in operating profit, has $1 billion in investment, and uses a cost of capital rate of 5%, so the capital charge is $50 million and the economic profit is $50 million. Relevant calculations are contained in Part 1 of the following schedule: Part 1: Economic Profit (in thousands, except cost of capital rate) Revenue Onerating costs. $ 500,000