The average Market Risk Premium (MRP) used in 2008 by professors in the United States (6.5%) was higher than the one used by their colleagues in Europe (5.3%), Canada (5.4%), the United Kingdom (5.6%) and Australia (5.9%). The dispersion of the MRP was high. 15% ofthe professors decreased their...

We derive discount rates for depreciation and amortization tax shields resulting from asset step-ups in corporate mergers and acquisitions. By assigning all relevant sources of uncertainty for such kind of tax shields and by accounting for corporate debt it is shown that for APV valuations r*, a...

The financial crisis which started in the United States in 2007 and which has spread throughout the world has many causes, one of which is the abundance of unethical behavior on the part of many of those who made the financial decisions, such as regulators, supervisors, managers and employees,...

We compute the correlations of the annual stock returns (1989-2008) of the Dow Jones companies with a) Rm; and with b) Rm; and find that the second correlation (assuming beta = 1 for all companies) is higher than the first one, on average, and for all companies except Caterpillar and General...

We argue that the equity premium puzzle may be explained by the fact that most market participants (equity investors, investment banks, analysts, companies¿) do not use standard theory (such as a standard representative consumer asset pricing model) for determining their Required Equity...

During 2004, 64% of the companies in the S&P 500 created value, while in 2003 the figure was 87%. The market value of the 500 companies was $11.2 trillion in 2004, compared to $10.1 trillion in 2003. The top shareholder value creators in 2004 were Exxon, General Electric, Ebay, Johnson & Johnson...

I review 100 finance and valuation textbooks published between 1979 and 2008 by authors such as Brealey and Myers, Copeland, Damodaran, Merton, Ross, Bruner, Bodie, Penman, Weston, Brigham and Arzac and find that their recommendations regarding the equity premium range from 3% to 10%. I also...

For over 30 years academics and practitioners have been debating the merits of the CAPM. One of the characteristics of this model is that it measures risk by beta, which follows from an equilibrium in which investors display mean-variance behavior. In that framework, risk is assessed by the...

2003 was a good year for the shareholders of the companies in the Euro Stoxx 50: the shareholder value creation of these 50 companies was €150,016 million. The companies that created most value for their shareholder were Siemens (€18,778 million), Telefonica (15,382) and BSCH (12,443). The...

We prove that in a world without leverage cost the relationship between the levered beta ( L) and the unlevered beta ( u) is the No-costs-of-leverage formula: L = u + ( u - d) D (1 - T) / E. We also analyze 6 alternative valuation theories proposed in the literature to estimate the relationship...