In recent years, firms have turned to their attention increasingly to ways in which they can increase their value. A number of competing measures, each with claims to being the "best" approach to value creation, have been developed and marketed by investment banking firms and consulting firms....

The last two decades have seen a stream of innovation in financial markets, especially in the corporate bond arena. Some of these innovations were designed to give firms more flexibility in designing cash flows on borrowings, allowing them to match up cash flows on financing more closely to cash...

In traditional valuation models, we begin by forecasting earnings and cash flows and discount these cash flows back at an appropriate discount rate to arrive at the value of a firm or asset. This task is simpler when valuing firms with positive earnings, a long history of performance and a large...

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. The model requires three inputs to compute expected returns – a riskfree rate, a beta for an asset and an expected risk premium...

Equity risk premiums are a central component of every risk and return model in finance. Given their importance, it is surprising how haphazard the estimation of equity risk premiums remains in practice. The standard approach to estimating equity risk premiums remains the use of historical...

Most firm valuation models start with the after-tax operating income as a measure of the operating income on a firm and reduce it by the reinvestment rate to arrive at the free cash flow to the firm. Implicitly, we assume that the operating expenses do not include any financing expenses (such as...

We study changes in organizational form in the real estate industry based on a sample of 128 changes announced during the period from January 1, 1966 through December 31, 1989. The rich variety of organizational forms of real estate firms with varying degrees of restrictiveness of the equity...

We formulate several testable hypotheses on managerial motivation and test our hypotheses by using a sample of 128 organizational form changes in the real estate industry. We find that firms that switch to a more restrictive (tighter) organizational structure have increases in stock value, and...

Most valuation models begin with a measure of accounting earnings to arrive at cash flow estimates. When using accounting earnings, we implicitly assume that the income is obtained by netting out only those expenses that are operating expenses, i.e., expenses designed to generate revenues in the...