We explore the effects of two kinds of competition on the cost of capital in the tax-exempt bond market: (1) competition amongst underwriters and (2) competition amongst issuers (most of which are quasi-public special authorities sanctioned by state governments). The first kind of...

The ability of corporations to raise external equity finance varies with macroeconomic conditions, suggesting that the cost of equity issuance is time-varying. Using cross sectional data on U.S. publicly traded firms, we construct an empirical proxy of an aggregate shock to the cost of equity...

In this paper, we first provide evidence that existing measures of business incomes and valuations based on widely-used surveys such as the Survey of Consumer Finances are mismeasured. We then develop a theory disciplined by U.S. national accounts and business census data to measure net incomes...

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates the return on investments of foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational companies over the period 1982--2006 averaged 9.4 percent annually after taxes; U.S. subsidiaries of foreign multinationals averaged only 3.2 percent. Two factors distort...

We develop a firm-specific measure of organization capital and estimate it for a sample of approximately 250 companies. We test the validity of the organization capital measure within a widely used investment valuation model and show that our organization capital estimate contributes...

Costs of equity for individual firms are estimated in a Bayesian framework using several factor-based pricing models. Substantial prior uncertainty about mispricing often produces an estimated cost of equity close to that obtained with mispricing precluded, even for a stock whose average return...

A number of countries have delayed the opening of their capital markets to international" investment because of reservations about the impact of foreign speculators on both expected" returns and market volatility. We propose a cross-sectional time-series model that attempts to" assess the impact...

We argue that the empirical evidence against the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) based on stock returns does not invalidate its use for estimating the cost of capital for projects in making capital budgeting decisions. Since stocks are backed not only by projects in place, but also the...

We reexamine the time-series relation between the conditional mean and variance of stock market returns. To proxy for the conditional mean return, we use the implied cost of capital, computed using analyst forecasts. The usefulness of this proxy is shown in simulations. In empirical analysis, we...

Standard theory implies that the discount rates used by firms in investment decisions (i.e., their required returns to capital) determine investment and transmit financial shocks to the real economy. However, there exists little evidence on how firms' discount rates change over time and affect...