The growth of financial markets in Asia and Latin America and the allure of globalization has made the analysis and assessment of country risk a critical component of valuation in recent years. In this paper, we consider two issues. The first is the whether country risk should be considered...

As companies and investors globalize, we are increasingly faced with estimation questions about the risk associated with this globalization. When investors invest in China Mobile, Infosys or Vale, they may be rewarded with higher returns but they are also exposed to additional risk. When Siemens...

The equity risk premium is the price of risk in equity markets and is a key input in estimating costs of equity and capital in both corporate finance and valuation. Given its importance, it is surprising how haphazard the estimation of equity risk premiums remains in practice. We begin this...

The genesis of this IFC White Book lies in the teaching materials prepared for IFC's Risk Governance Workshops conducted in 20 developing countries during the 2010–2012 time period by the book's authors. The book and workshops also benefited from the contributions of Torben Andersen of...

Valuing banks, insurance companies, and investment banks has always been a daunting exercise, but the rolling market crises of the last few years have made a difficult job even more so. There are two key measurement problems that you face in valuing financial services firms. The first is that...

Many studies argue that differences in information across securities explain much of the cross-sectional variation in stock return volatility. We offer an explanation beyond that previously identified in the literature by developing a proxy for differential information. Our proxy follows from...

Most valuation models begin with a measure of accounting earnings to arrive at cash flow estimates. When using accounting earnings, we implicitly assume that the income is obtained by netting out only those expenses that are operating expenses, i.e., expenses designed to generate revenues in the...

In traditional valuation models, we begin by forecasting earnings and cash flows anddiscount these cash flows back at an appropriate discount rate to arrive at the value of a firm or asset. This task is simpler when valuing firms with positive earnings, a long history of performance and a large...

Most firm valuation models start with the after-tax operating income as a measure of the operating income on a firm and reduce it by the reinvestment rate to arrive at the free cash flow to the firm. Implicitly, we assume that the operating expenses do not include any financing expenses (such as...

In recent years, firms have turned to their attention increasingly to ways in which they can increase their value. A number of competing measures, each with claims to being the quot;bestquot; approach to value creation, have been developed and marketed by investment banking firms and consulting...