IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/2219.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Discounting Rules for Risky Assets

Author

Listed:
  • Stewart C. Myers
  • Richard S. Ruback

Abstract

This paper develops a rule for calculating a discount rate to value risky projects. The rule assumes that asset risk can be measured by a single index (e.g., beta), but makes no other assumptions about specific forms of the asset pricing model. It treats all projects as combinations of two assets: Treasury bills and the market portfolio. We know how to value each of these assets under any theory of debt and taxes and under any assumption about the slope and intercept of the market line for equity securities. Our discount rate is a weighted average of the after-tax return on riskless debt and the expected return on the portfolio, where the weight on the market portfolio is beta.

Suggested Citation

  • Stewart C. Myers & Richard S. Ruback, 1987. "Discounting Rules for Risky Assets," NBER Working Papers 2219, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2219
    Note: ME
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w2219.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Myers, Stewart C, 1974. "Interactions of Corporate Financing and Investment Decisions-Implications for Capital Budgeting," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 29(1), pages 1-25, March.
    2. Franks, Julian R & Hodges, Stewart D, 1978. "Valuation of Financial Lease Contracts: A Note," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 33(2), pages 657-669, May.
    3. Myers, Stewart C & Turnbull, Stuart M, 1977. "Capital Budgeting and the Capital Asset Pricing Model: Good News and Bad News," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 32(2), pages 321-333, May.
    4. Miles, James A. & Ezzell, John R., 1980. "The Weighted Average Cost of Capital, Perfect Capital Markets, and Project Life: A Clarification," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 15(3), pages 719-730, September.
    5. Fama, Eugene F., 1977. "Risk-adjusted discount rates and capital budgeting under uncertainty," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 3-24, August.
    6. Miller, Merton H, 1977. "Debt and Taxes," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 32(2), pages 261-275, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alexander Peter Groh & Oliver Gottschalg, 2008. "The Opportunity Cost of Capital of US Buyouts," NBER Working Papers 14148, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Myers, Stewart C. & Ruback, Richard S., 1954-, 1987. "Discounting rules for risky assets," Working papers 1853-87., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
    2. Peter Brusov & Tatiana Filatova, 2023. "Capital Structure Theory: Past, Present, Future," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 11(3), pages 1-30, January.
    3. Fernández, Pablo, 1995. "Equivalence of the APV, WACC and flows to equity approaches to firm valuation," IESE Research Papers D/292, IESE Business School.
    4. Robert A. Taggart, Jr., 1989. "Consistent Valuation and Cost of Capital Expressions with Corporate and Personal TAxes," NBER Working Papers 3074, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Schosser, Josef, 2008. "Bewertung ohne "Kapitalkosten": Ein arbitragetheoretischer Ansatz zu Unternehmenswert, Kapitalstruktur und persönlicher Besteuerung," Passauer Diskussionspapiere, Betriebswirtschaftliche Reihe 13, University of Passau, Faculty of Business and Economics.
    6. Ian Dobbs & Anthony Miller, 2002. "Capital budgeting, valuation and personal taxes," Accounting and Business Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(4), pages 227-243.
    7. Fernandez, Pablo, 2003. "Levered and unlevered Beta," IESE Research Papers D/488, IESE Business School.
    8. Marko Volker Krause & Alexander Lahmann, 2016. "Reconsidering the appropriate discount rate for tax shield valuation," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 86(5), pages 477-512, July.
    9. Fernandez, Pablo, 2005. "Financial literature about discounted cash flow valuation," IESE Research Papers D/606, IESE Business School.
    10. Laurence Booth, 2007. "Capital Cash Flows, APV and Valuation," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 13(1), pages 29-48, January.
    11. Ignacio Velez-Pareja & Julian Benavides Franco, 2011. "Cost of Capital when Dividends are Deductible," Brazilian Review of Finance, Brazilian Society of Finance, vol. 9(3), pages 309-334.
    12. Pasquale De Luca, 2017. "Debt Level and the Firm Levered Cost of Capital," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 7(5), pages 475-484.
    13. Fernandez, Pablo, 2004. "The value of tax shields is NOT equal to the present value of tax shields," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 145-165, July.
    14. Mike Miles & John Pringle & Brian Webb, 1989. "Modeling the Corporate Real Estate Decision," Journal of Real Estate Research, American Real Estate Society, vol. 4(3), pages 47-66.
    15. Shigufta Hena Uzma & J.P. Singh & Naveen Kumar, 2010. "Discounted Cash Flow and Its Implication on Intangible Valuation," Global Business Review, International Management Institute, vol. 11(3), pages 365-377, October.
    16. Mario Massari & Francesco Roncaglio & Laura Zanetti, 2008. "On the Equivalence between the APV and the wacc Approach in a Growing Leveraged Firm," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 14(1), pages 152-162, January.
    17. Axel Pierru & Denis Babusiaux, 2000. "Coût du capital et étude de rentabilité d'investissement : une formulation unique de l'ensemble des méthodes," Working Papers hal-02437423, HAL.
    18. Ralf Diedrich & Stefan Dierkes & Hans-Christian Gröger, 2022. "A note on the cost of capital with fixed payout ratios," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 59(4), pages 1559-1575, November.
    19. Fischer, Max & Krause, Marko & Lahmann, Alexander & Stimper, Franziska, 2022. "Firm valuation with state dependent COD taxation," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 550-561.
    20. Ronald W. Spahr & Pankaj K. Jain & Fariz Huseynov & Bhavik Rajesh Parikh, 2012. "Tax policy and macro-finance in a competitive global economy where government is considered as firms' third financial stakeholder," Global Business and Economics Review, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 14(1/2), pages 30-66.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2219. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.