A common procedure for determining the cost of capital for capital investment decisions involves adjusting an unlevered beta for the risk of financial leverage. This note demonstrates that a widespread practice of levering the beta coefficients using the formula of Hamada implies a possibility...

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a process that manages all risks in an integrated, holistic fashion by controlling and coordinating any offsetting risks across the enterprise. This research investigates whether the adoption of the ERM approach affects firms' cost of equity capital. We...

Many models in energy economics assess the cost of alternative power generation technologies. As an input, the models require well calibrated assumptions for the cost of capital or discount rates to be used, especially for renewable energy for which the cost of capital differs widely across...

We use a dynamic model of the firm to ascertain both the value and the determinants of the debt tax shields. For a representative U.S. firm, we find that the value of the interest tax shields represents less than 5% of firm value, and it varies considerably across U.S. industries. Our results...

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...

Mandatory pension contributions (MCs) are negative shocks to a firm's liquidity that can unfavorably impact its cost of capital, financing, and investment plans. We study whether firms faced with MCs use both non-cash (NEM) and cash generating earnings management (CEM) to partly offset their...

We model theoretically the optimal capital structure of entrepreneurial firm relying on an endogenous estimation of the return requested by entrepreneurs that compensates for the risk they incur in case of bankruptcy. We estimate the probability according to the Bayesian approach. We also...

Previous theoretical arguments suggest that industrial diversification provides a co-insurance effect that decreases the firm's default risk. In this paper, we endogenously estimate a firm's segment disclosure quality and investigate whether the quality of segment disclosures significantly...

Previous theoretical arguments suggest that industrial diversification provides a co-insurance effect that decreases the firm's default risk. In this paper, we endogenously estimate a firm's segment disclosure quality and investigate whether the quality of segment disclosures significantly...

We examine whether CEO extraversion, an important personality trait associated with leadership, affects firms' expected cost of equity capital. We measure CEO extraversion using CEOs' speech patterns during the unscripted portion of conference calls. After controlling for several CEO and firm...