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Still Many Ways to Skin a Capital Cost

Harvard Business Review

The motivation behind it, as with many, many articles published over HBR's nearly 90-year history, was to take an effective practice developed in one corner of industry and spread it to managers everywhere. Not at all, he said, because it's "no secret that applying the CAPM is as much an art as financial science." McNulty et al.

CAPM 15
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Why Sit on All that Cash? Firms Uncertain on Cost of Capital

Harvard Business Review

Only 46 percent use the perpetuity growth model, while 27 percent develop an explicit cash flow forecast for the entire life of a project. Fully 72 percent develop multiple cash flow scenarios representing the expected outcome as well as best- and worst-case outcomes, which are then discounted.

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Why Those Guys Won the Economics Nobels

Harvard Business Review

Campbell’s work has also made liberal use of the analytic tools developed by Hansen. Back in the ‘60s, people developed the capital asset pricing model [CAPM] as a way to do that. And the theory that was available then was CAPM. One can distinguish between what we call time series models and cross-sectional models.

CAPM 9
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Stop Trying to Predict Which New Products Will Succeed

Harvard Business Review

How you answer this question may be the most important factor in how you design your product development process — and, ultimately, in whether your business succeeds or fails. Product development' When is it possible to predict a product’s success? Is market performance predictable for a specific product or class of products?

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What Private Equity Investors Think They Do for the Companies They Buy

Harvard Business Review

In operational engineering, PE firms develop industry and operating expertise that they bring to bear to add value to their portfolio companies. Furthermore, few PE investors explicitly use the capital asset price model (CAPM) to determine a cost of capital.

CAPM 8