Over the last three decades, the capital asset pricing model has occupied a central and often controversial place in most corporate finance analysts tool chests.(...)

Valuing banks, insurance companies and investment banks has always been difficult, but the market crisis of 2008 elevated the concern to the top of the list of valuation issues. The problems with valuing financial service firm stem from two key characteristics. The first is that the cash flows...

Equity risk premiums are a central component of every risk and return model in finance and are a key input into estimating costs of equity and capital in both corporate finance and valuation. Given their importance, it is surprising how haphazard the estimation of equity risk premiums remains in...

Much of financial theory and practice is built on the presumption that markets are liquid. In a liquid market, you should be able to buy or sell any asset, in any quantity, at the prevailing market price and with no transactions costs. Using that definition, no asset is completely liquid and...

As we sift through the debris of the last economic crisis, we are reminded again that most business disasters can be traced back to bad risk taking. In particular, when managers over reach and expose their businesses to the wrong type of risks or too much risk, investors in these firms...

Investors have to be offered risk premiums to invest in risky assets. These risk premiums take different forms in different asset markets: equity risk premiums (ERP) in stock markets, default spreads in bond markets and real asset premiums in other asset markets. These premiums have their roots...

In corporate finance and investment analysis, we assume that there is an investment with a guaranteed return that offers both firms and investors a “risk free” choice. This assumption, innocuous though it may seem, is a critical component of both risk and return models and corporate...

The academic research is incontrovertible. On paper, value investing (at least as defined as investing in low PE and low price to book stocks) beats growth investing. Notwithstanding this finding, growth investing retains its allure with a large subset of investors, drawn by the payoff from...

Value investors generally characterize themselves as the grown ups in the investment world, unswayed by perceptions or momentum, and driven by fundamentals. While this may be true, at least in the abstract, there are at least three distinct strands of value investing. The first, passive value...

Equity risk premiums are a central component of every risk and return model in finance and are a key input into estimating costs of equity and capital in both corporate finance and valuation. Given their importance, it is surprising how haphazard the estimation of equity risk premiums remains in...