One of the most significant assets held by individual New Zealanders, with a matching liability to taxpayers, is the pension entitlements of the Government Superannuation Fund (GSF). These entitlements are of the "defined benefit" rather than "defined contribution" form, i.e., they are...

This paper documents historical returns to equities and long-term government bonds, bond yields and inflation rates in New Zealand over the period 1931-2002. Personal tax rates on various types of investment income are also estimated. This data is used to estimate the market risk premiums in two...

Azar (2007) argues that an appropriate market-based estimate of the US real social discount rate is 5.66%, with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 5.62 to 5.71%. However, this line of argument implicitly and wrongly equates the risk on public sector projects with that for the optimal...

This paper develops formulae for the valuation of companies and projects where there is both differential personal taxation of dividends and interest arising from dividend imputation, and differential taxation of interest and capital gains. The former has been addressed in the literature. This...

This paper analyses the issue of the timing of expenditures in replacing fixed assets within the context of valuing firms using the free cash flow approach. Standard practice amongst both practitioners and academics is to assume a smooth pattern in these expenditures past some future point, and...

Associate Professor Martin Lally presented Forward Looking Estimates of the Market Risk Premium at the half-day Regulatory Cost of Capital II: What is the Market Risk Premium? Copies of Martins underlying papers on the topics can be obtained by contacting him at martin.lally@vuw.ac.nz

Dr Martin Lally presented The Impact of Regulation on the Firm's Cost of Capital at the ISCR forum, The Cost of Capital for the Regulated Firm in August 2003

This paper examines four issues associated with the Officer model, in the context of estimating the cost of equity capital for regulatory purposes. The conclusions are thus. First, regarding the issue of foreign investors, continued use of a version of the Capital Asset Pricing Model that...

In estimating a firm's cost of equity with the CAPM the standard procedure is to proxy the market portfolio by a share index. Since this index is not the market portfolio this may give rise to a bias in estimating the firm's cost of equity. This paper investigates this bias and concludes that it...

Within the last ten years, the New Zealand government has reformed itself from a system using antiquated management and accounting methods into a system that has attracted attention from government officials around the world. The new age methods adopted within the New Zealand government are...