We develop a sovereign default risk index using natural language processing techniques and 10 million news articles covering over 100 countries. The index is a highfrequency measure of countries' default risk, particularly for those lacking marketbased measures: it correlates with sovereign CDS...

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager-shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. Using panel data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we show that while refinancing costs help explain the...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

There are methods to match value added approaches (Residual Income Method, RIM and Economic Value Added, EVA) with discounted cash flow methods, DCF. In this note we use a real life case from an emerging country to illustrate the matching, with complexities such as unpaid taxes, losses carried...

We evaluate the influence of measurement error in analysts' forecasts on the accuracy of implied cost of capital estimates from various implementations of the ‘implied cost of capital' approach, and develop corrections for the measurement error. We document predictable error in the implied...

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...

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...

We compare the accuracy of cost of equity estimates based on leading factor models to two simple alternatives: the asset mean and the market mean. The market mean proves to be a serious competitor to traditional implementations of factor models even if the underlying factor model is true....

Based on the linear decomposition of a firm's beta on the betas of its growth options and its Assets in Place, we propose a feedback algorithm to estimate the latter. Our proposal is founded on the existence of risk classes defined by a specific level of systematic risk for current business and...

Efficient estimation of the equity cost of public corporations is an essential component of computing the required rate of return of real investment projects, and therefore the basis for a rational investment policy. The accepted methodology relies on the CAPM model to define the return risk...