Business economics does not provide any methodology for appraising strategic investments, relying on informal approaches. Conversely, financial economics offers us plenty of sophisticated mathematical models unsuitable for applications and based on unrealistic assumptions. This paper presents an...

This teaching note shows the relationship between levered and unlevered betas and the general formulation for the cost of equity. It also shows, step by step, the procedure to estimate betas from data found in the stock market.It shows well known procedures for estimating betas: correlation...

This is a teaching material for a module of Financial analysis at Universidad Tecnológica de Bolivar. The educational material was developed with Professor Ricardo Davila from Universidad Javeriana, Bogota, Colombia. The written material has been modified several times using the feedback from...

The internal rate of return (IRR) is a widely used benchmark for assessing the reliability of the accounting rate of return (ROA) as a measure of economic profitability. We turn this reasoning process on its head by demonstrating that a suitable (weighted average) aggregation of ROAs better...

La mayoría de los libros de finanzas (Véase Benninga y Sarig, 1997, Brealey, Myers y Marcus, 1996, Copeland, Koller y Murrin, 1994, Damodaran, 1996, Gallagher y Andrew, 2000, Van Horne, 1998, Vélez, 1998, Weston, y Copeland, 1992) estipulan que el costo promedio de capital (CPC) se calcula...

The recent notion of Average Internal Rate of Return (AIRR) [Magni 2010, The Engineering Economist, 55(2), 150-180] completely solves the long-standing problem of the internal rate of return (IRR). While the AIRR is a return measure, this paper presents a cash-flow measure, namely the ratio of...

The internal rate of return (IRR) is used extensively in the real estate sector, notwithstanding certain nagging deficiencies taught in most business school texts, such as that the IRR may have multiple solutions which cannot be reconciled; or that it may lead to decisions that are not consistent...

This paper analyzes the net-present-value (NPV) model, a keystone in economics: Behaviors and lines of reasoning of NPV-minded decision makers are observed and analyzed. As a result, one finds out that the NPV methodology is biased and its decision makers fall prey to various forms of fallacies...

This is a course material (slides in pdf format) from the book 'Investment Decision Making For Firm and Project Valuation.' The book is originally in Spanish and is untitled as 'Decisiones de inversion. Para la valoracion financiera de proyectos y empresas.' Chapter 5 deals with how to prepare...

This paper proposes a method for evaluating a project under certainty by means of a systemic outlook, which borrows from accounting the way of representing economic facts while replacing accounting values with cash values. The investor's net worth is regarded as a system whose structure changes...