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...

We use earnings forecasts from a cross-sectional model to proxy for cash flow expectations and estimate the implied cost of capital (ICC) for a large sample of firms over 1968-2008. The earnings forecasts generated by the cross-sectional model are superior to analysts' forecasts in terms of...

When Capital Asset pricing Model (CAPM) is considered as valid asset pricing theory, Security Market Line (SML) is supposed to give ex-ante returns for the single period investment horizon. Since the required returns should be same as the cost of equity (discount rates) in efficient markets, SML...

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...

Market portfolio composition substantially affects cost of equity estimates. Adding Treasury securities to an equity-only market portfolio substantially changes both estimated market betas and the estimated market excess return. Though the sign and magnitude of the net impact of these changes is...

It is widely held that better financial reporting makes investors more confident in their predictions of future cash flows and reduces their required risk premia. The logic is that more information leads necessarily to more certainty, and hence lower subjective estimates of firm "beta" or...

We argue that the CAPM may be a reasonable model for estimating the cost of capital for projects in spite of increasing empirical evidence in the literature against the CAPM based on stock returns. As McDonald and Siegel (1985) and Berk, Green and Naik (1999) point out, stocks are backed by...

Using data from a decade of surveys of corporate managers, I find evidence that firms with higher expected stock returns have a higher perceived cost of equity and use higher discount rates in capital budgeting. Variation in expected stock returns, as measured by exposure to equity risk factors,...

The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) receives both criticism and widespread adoption by practitioners and academics as the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) equity component. This study introduces two new costs of equity measures to address CAPM criticisms and provide new perspective on...

Previous research on insurer cost of equity (COE) focuses on single-period asset pricing models. In reality, however, investment and consumption decisions are made over multiple periods, exposing firms to time-varying risks related to economic cycles and market volatility. We extend the...