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Still Many Ways to Skin a Capital Cost

Harvard Business Review

knew that firms were making heavy use of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) to size up growth opportunities, but that the model was only as good as its inputs. But that article was written a decade ago, and still the CAPM rules — and as for how to come up with the crucial inputs to it, well, practice remains all over the map.

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

Harvard Business Review

This is the key finding of the Current Trends in Estimating and Applying the Cost of Capital research released this week by the Association for Financial Professionals, a trade group of 16,000 corporate treasury and finance practitioners. Download this pdf for an executive summary, or login here for the full report.)

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What the Great Fama-Shiller Debate Has Taught Us

Harvard Business Review

I think he got the Nobel nod (instead of somebody like Andy Lo , or Mordechai Kurz , or Roman Frydman ) because he was (1) very early to the game, (2) a macroeconomist (the Nobel people generally seem more comfortable with macro than with finance), and (3) most suited to being shoehorned into a narrative of steady scientific progress.

CAPM 10
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Why Those Guys Won the Economics Nobels

Harvard Business Review

He got his PhD at Yale under Shiller’s supervision in 1984, but since then he has also done a lot of work expanding on Fama’s ideas about risk and return, some of it co-authored with Fama’s son-in-law and University of Chicago finance colleague, John Cochrane. And the theory that was available then was CAPM. It goes back to the 1970s.

CAPM 9
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What Private Equity Investors Think They Do for the Companies They Buy

Harvard Business Review

In particular, we are interested in how many of their responses correlate with what academic finance knows and what it teaches. Furthermore, few PE investors explicitly use the capital asset price model (CAPM) to determine a cost of capital. the notion that debt financing can be “cheap” at certain times).

CAPM 8
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Stop Trying to Predict Which New Products Will Succeed

Harvard Business Review

Though there are multiple types of prediction, the gold standard is the prediction of precise outcomes.