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...

In conventional valuation, we assume that all equity claims are identical and divide the value of equity by the number of claims (shares) to get the value per claim (share). In practice, though, claims on equity can vary on a number of dimensions. First, the claim can be a direct and perpetual...

A key input, when valuing businesses, is the expected growth rate in earnings and cash flows. Allowing for a higher growth rate in earnings usually translates into higher value for a firm. But why do some firms grow faster than others? In other words, where does growth come from? In this paper,...

In a typical leveraged buyout, there are three components. The acquirers borrow a significant portion of a publicly traded firm's value (leverage), take a key role in the management of the firm (control) and often take it off public markets (going private). None of these three components is new...

If there has been a shift in corporate finance and valuation in recent years, it has been towards giving excess returns a more central role in determining the value of a business. While early valuation models emphasized the relationship between growth and value - higher growth firms were...

Risk can be both a threat to a firm's financial health and an opportunity to get ahead of the competition. Most analysts, when they refer to risk management, focus on the threat posed by risk and emphasize protecting against that threat (i.e. risk hedging). In keeping with this narrow definition...

The growth of financial markets in Asia and Latin America and the allure of globalization have made the analysis and assessment of country risk a critical component of valuation in recent years. In this paper, we consider two issues. The first is the whether country risk should be considered...

Traditional valuation techniques - both DCF and relative - short change the effects of financial distress on value. In most valuations, we ignore distress entirely and make implicit assumptions that are often unrealistic about the consequences of a firm being unable to meet its financial...

It is clear that some firms are more forthcoming about their financial affairs than other firms, and that the financial statements of a few firms are designed to obscure rather than reveal information. While differences in accounting standards across countries was viewed as the primary culprit...

In the last decade, firms have increasingly turned to offering employees options and restricted stock (often with restrictions on trading) as part of compensation packages. Some of this trend can be attributed to the entry of young, cash poor technology firms into the market, many of which have...