The present paper calculates systematic risk within the context of the Capital Asset Pricing Model in order to investigate the significance of financial leverage. It develops a multinomial model with two theoretically predicted targets in the unleveraged/leveraged process, namely the proxy...

Standard factor pricing models do not capture well the common time-series or cross-sectional variation in average returns of financial stocks. We propose a five-factor asset pricing model that complements the standard Fama and French (1993) three-factor model with a financial sector ROE factor...

We use earnings forecasts from a cross-sectional model to proxy for cash flow expectations and estimate the implied cost of capital (ICC) for a large sample of firms over 1968-2008. The earnings forecasts generated by the cross-sectional model are superior to analysts' forecasts in terms of...

Using data from a decade of surveys of corporate managers, I find evidence that firms with higher expected stock returns have a higher perceived cost of equity and use higher discount rates in capital budgeting. Variation in expected stock returns, as measured by exposure to equity risk factors,...

In order to explain cross-country differences in the effects of capital market liberalization, this paper proposes a model of international asset markets in which investors in different countries each face constraints on portfolio choice. The model demonstrates that liberalization, i.e. the...

This paper shows that, when as usual the market portfolio is proxied by a share portfolio, then the conventional Ibbotson (1999) estimator of the market risk premium violates Miller-Modigliani (1958 and 1963) propositions II and III. A new estimator of the market risk premium is proposed which...

This paper describes and compares two processes for assessing and assigning cost of capital in the public sector: that for Departments under the Capital Charge process and that recommended for SOEs. The processes are similar in the sense of using private sector type technology, and in particular...

Simulating a realistic-sized equity premium in macroeconomic models has proved a daunting challenge, hence the "equity premium puzzle." "Resolving'' the puzzle requires heavy lifting. Precise choices of particular preferences, shocks, technologies, and hard borrowing constraints can do the...