We survey 79 private equity (PE) investors with combined assets under management of more than $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rates of return and multiples to evaluate investments. Their...

The median U.S. non-regulated firm reports a 47 percent decline in leverage ratio between 1980 and 2010. We investigate whether the cost-benefit tradeoff to shareholders, captured by the valuation impact of an additional dollar of debt on owners' equity, is an explanation for the observed change...

Although there is a strong consensus that the weights in the cost of capital calculation must be market value weights, in a business valuation, appraisers do not use an unique approach to estimate the capital structure that will prevail in the future. In fact, both practitioners and academics...

We derive discount rates for depreciation and amortization tax shields resulting from asset step-ups in corporate mergers and acquisitions. By assigning all relevant sources of uncertainty for such kind of tax shields and by accounting for corporate debt it is shown that for APV valuations r*, a...

The value of a levered firm depends to a large extent upon the value of the tax shields. The German Corporate Tax Reform Act 2008 changes the tax system dramatically and introduces a new ceiling for the tax-deduction of interest payments. A central objective of this reform has been the tax...

Researchers in empirical corporate finance often use bounded ratios (e.g. debt ratios) as dependent variables in their regressions. Using the example of estimating the speed of adjustment toward target leverage, we show by Monte Carlo and resampling experiments that commonly applied estimators...

The evolution of the debt ratio under alternative types of managerial behavior can generate non-standard leverage processes. This creates problems for statistical inference in empirical capital structure research. We argue in this paper that when the data generating process is not standard, a...

Does internationalization affect firm valuation? To answer this question, literature mainly considers firms from around the world internationalizing by issuing equity in the USA, whereas the current study focuses on US firms that internationalize by issuing debt in overseas markets. This paper...

This paper proposes a new discounted cash flows' valuation setup, and derives a general expression for the tax shields' discount rate. This setup applies to any debt policy and any cash flow pattern. It only requires the equality at any time between the assets side and the liabilities side of...