A vast literature examines the role of debt in corporate valuation, but most of these works proceed from the vantage point of corporate finance (i.e., ascertaining the effects of adding debt to a previously unlevered company). The investment analyst, however, confronts an already-levered company...

A key determinant of shareholder value is the franchise spread - the company's incremental return on new investments over the cost of capital. Explicitly incorporating this spread into the valuation process paves the way for a more compact, two-parameter formulation of the standard...

In 2001, a small group of academics and practitioners met to discuss the equity risk premium (ERP). Ten years later, in 2011, a similar discussion took place, with participants writing up their thoughts for this volume. The result is a rich set of papers that practitioners may find useful in...

This article presents a highly intuitive approach for visualizing return distributions for a basic form of cash/equity allocations. This “percentile fan” framework can help clarify some of the key risk-return trade-offs in intuitive ways for a wide set of asset owners. In particular,...