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...

Company valuation using discounted cash flows is based on the valuation of the Government bonds: it consists of applying the procedure used to value the Government bonds to the debt and shares of a company. This is easy to understand (sections 1, 2 and 3). But company valuation is complicated by...

Spanish Astract: Conviene no perder de vista algo obvio: esta crisis, como todas, es el resultado de decisiones concretas tomadas por personas concretas. Verdad y responsabilidad son y serán, cada vez más, características competitivas de los países.Este artículo termina formulando la...

In the period 1991-2010, the S&P 500 destroyed value for the shareholders ($4.5 trillion). In 1991-1999 it created value ($5.1 trillion), but in 2000-2010 it destroyed $9.6 trillion. The market value of the S&P 500 was $2.8 trillion in 1991 and $11.4 trillion in 2010.We also calculate the...

I review 150 textbooks on corporate finance and valuation published between 1979 and 2009 by authors such as Brealey, Myers, Copeland, Damodaran, Merton, Ross, Bruner, Bodie, Penman, Arzac… and find that their recommendations regarding the equity premium range from 3% to 10%, and that 51 books...

We report 2,510 answers from professors from 65 countries and 934 institutions. 1,791 respondents use betas, but 107 of them do not justify the betas they use.97.3% of the professors that justify the betas use regressions, webs, databases, textbooks or papers (the paper specifies which ones),...

We compute the correlations of the annual stock returns (1989-2008) of the Dow Jones companies with a) β Rm; and with b) Rm; and find that the second correlation (assuming beta = 1 for all companies) is higher than the first one, on average, and for all companies except Caterpillar and General...

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,...

In this note, we extend a numerical example in the textbook by Berk & DeMarzo that matches methods for only when K_TS is equal to K_D. We show that there is a generalized formulation for the return to levered equity K_E that works for any value of K_TS, the appropriate discount rate for the tax...