We present the derivation of cost of capital under the assumption of risky tax shields discounted with the cost of levered equity. We show that the formulation is consistent and is derived from basic financial principles. This formulation is valid for finite cash flows and non growing...

The discount rate is one of the most critical variables in every equity valuation. Against this background it is surprising that so far there is no generally accepted definition of this term. Literature provides quite different definitions: expected returns, conditionally expected returns or...

My answer to the question in the title is NO. It is crystal clear that CAPM and its Betas do not explain anything about expected or required returns. There are mountains of evidence to support my stance.If, for any reason, a person teaches that Beta and CAPM explain something and he knows that...

The Market Portfolio is not an efficient portfolio. There are many evidences that tell us that: the equal weighted indexes have beaten their market-value weighted indexes for many years, many easy-to-build portfolios (some “smart-beta”, “multifactors”) have beaten market-value weighted...

I review 150 textbooks on corporate finance and valuation published between 1979 and 2009 by authors such as Brealey, Myers, Copeland, Damodaran, Merton, Ross, Bruner, Bodie, Penman, Arzac… and find that their recommendations regarding the equity premium range from 3% to 10%, and that 51 books...

Regulators of many countries try to find the “true” WACC of Electricity, Gas, Water… activities. All their documents have in common a main confusion: they do not differentiate among expected, required, historical, and regulator allowed returns, which are 4 very different concepts. Most of...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is theoretically incomplete in its demand-side focus, risk-averse investors, and internally inconsistent homogeneous beliefs; is not conclusively supported empirically; and yet it legitimizes a notion that investors can earn higher returns by bearing...

This paper contains the statistics of a survey about the Risk-Free Rate (RF) and the Market Risk Premium (MRP) used in 2020 for 81 countries. We got answers for 87 countries, but we only report the results for 81 countries with more than 6 answers.Many respondents use for European countries a RF...