This paper develops a theory of the firm's weighted average cost of capital (WACC) and the marginal tax rate with risky debt and potentially redundant depreciation and interest tax shields. The tax shields' risks, the firm's borrowing interest rate and its marginal tax rate are intertwined, and...

We re-examine the claim that many corporations are underleveraged in that they fail to take full advantage of debt tax shields. We show prior results suggesting underleverage stems from biased estimates of tax benefits from interest deductions. We develop improved estimates of marginal tax rates...

This paper studies the relation between financial reporting quality and investment efficiency on a sample of 38,062 firm-year observations between 1980 and 2003. Financial reporting quality has been posited to improve investment efficiency, but to date there has been little empirical evidence to...

I have worked for many years as senior consultant and advisor for the majority of European Pulpamp;Paper companies, the majority of Nordic Packaging and Nuclear companies and other industries, and have found that values corresponding to billions of dollars are destroyed in the industry. Not...

The binary classification of firms into profits or losses represents a powerful heuristic. The literature that has examined the impact on the firm of this earnings heuristic has focused on the earnings management actions of small profit firms. The impact of this earnings heuristic on the actions...

The Economic Value Added formally translates the theoretical notion of excess profit (also known as residual income). Its use is so firmly entrenched in applied corporate finance and management accounting that its name is often used as a noun for denoting the concept of excess profit itself....

This paper presents a new way of measuring residual income, originally introduced by Magni (2000a,b,c, 2001a,b, 2003). Contrary to the standard residual income, the capital charge is equal to the capital lost by investors. The lost capital may be viewed as (a) the foregone capital, (b) the...

Counterfactual conditionals are cognitive tools that we incessantly use during our lives for judgments, evaluations, decisions. Counterfactuals are used for defining concepts as well; an instance of this is attested by the notions of opportunity cost and excess profit, two all-pervasive notions...

In most of the literature, the discounted cash flow techniques; i.e., NPV and IRR deal with discrete-end-of-year cash flow conditions. However, such a discrete condition would not be justified if several of the cash flow items were realized continuously during the year. The adoption of...