Interest rates have a considerable bearing on share prices. Any investor's experience shows that, in general, when interest rates fall significantly, share prices rise, and vice-versa. We begin by observing the evolution of interest rates in the last 22 years in the United States. We also look...

We introduce a new, market-based and forward looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country's U.S. dollar debt and an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions,...

Classical single-factor comparable company valuation (CCV) like e.g. valuation using the price-earnings ratio is associated with several shortcomings. The two most important are the non-applicability of negative values in the basis of reference and the high requirements to the qualitative...

In this article we use a real life case from an emerging country to illustrate the valuation with discounted cash flow methods that include complexities such as unpaid taxes, losses carried forward, foreign exchange debt, presumptive income and inflation adjustments to the Financial Statements....

This paper presents a formal derivation of general expressions for Ke and WACC in perpetuities with constant growth, which do not make any assumption on what the proper discount rate is to be applied to the firm's tax shield, and are complemented with numerical examples of its application....

The document starts with 100 questions that students, alumni and other persons (judges, arbitrageurs, clients…) have posed to me over the past years. They were recompiled so as to help the reader remember, clarify and, in some cases, discuss some useful concepts in finance. Most of the...

On April 16, 2012 the Argentine Federal Government decreed the intervention of YPF. Its share price declined 29% the day after. Two weeks later the Argentinean Parliament approved the expropriation of 51% of the YPF shares owned by Repsol. We prepared a month ago the case “Valuation of an...

This case presents the valuation of the shares of an electric company in an emerging country. It permits the reader to identify errors and recalculate the valuation.ElectraBul was expropriated by the government in April 2010. The government said that ElectraBul shareholders should be paid a fair...

On April 16, 2012 the Argentine Federal Government decreed the intervention of YPF and expropriated of 51% of the YPF shares owned by Repsol. Repsol had a 57.4% stake. A tribunal will determine the compensation Repsol will receive for its YPF shares. You are required to help the tribunal. What...

This is an annotated appendix that accompanies the paper. In this note, we provide detailed commentary on a numerical example that illustrates the ideas that we discuss in the main paper. The numerical example is in Table18.10, Chapter 8, page 656, of the third edition of Corporate Finance,...