We show that incorporating defined benefit pension funds in an asset pricing model with incomplete markets improves its ability to jointly match the historical equity premium and riskless rate, and has important implications for risk sharing. We emphasize the importance of the pension fund's...

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...

Standard pay-as-you-go pension system is facing long-term and short-term sustainability challenges in several countries. Possible replacement of standard pension system might be in a form of private pension savings. Private pension savings are meaningful only if they provide sufficiently high...

This paper compares two different types of private retirement plans from the perspective of a representative beneficiary: a defined benefit (DB) and a defined contribution (DC) plan. While salary risk is the main common risk factor in DB and DC pension plans, one of the key differences is that...

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...

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...

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...