Implementing Fischer Black's Simple Discounting Rule

Corporate managers typically estimate the value of capital projects by discounting the project's expected future net cash flows at the cost of capital. The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) is generally used to estimate that cost. But, as anyone who has worked on the finance or business development staff of a public company can attest, there are major challenges in applying the CAPM, including largely unresolved questions about what constitutes the “market portfolio,” how to estimate market risk premiums, and how to estimate the betas of projects. In a short article published in Financial Management in 1988, Fischer Black proposed a valuation “discounting rule” that avoids all these problems—one that involves discounting a relatively certain (as opposed to an expected or average) level of operating cash flows at the risk-free rate. But Black's article does not address the question of how to calculate these “certainty equivalent” or “conditional” cash flows. In this article, the authors propose a way of implementing Black's rule that involves estimating the “conditional” cash flows in a three-step procedure:

• • Find a benchmark security that correlates with the project's cash flows;
• • Estimate the percentiles of the distribution in which the benchmark return equals the risk-free rate over different investment horizons;
• • Use information from corporate managers to assess the cash flows that define the same percentiles in the cash flow distributions.

As the authors point out, the virtue of Black's rule is that it shifts the focus of the analyst away from the assessment of discount factors and puts it squarely on the more challenging, and arguably more relevant, problem of estimating the project's cash flows.     

A Better Way to Measure Operating Performance (or Why the EVA Math Really Matters)

Most companies rely heavily on earnings to measure operating performance, but earnings growth has at least two important weaknesses as a proxy for investor wealth. Current earnings can come at the expense of future earnings through, for example, short‐sighted cutbacks in investment, including spending on R&D. But growth in EPS can also be achieved by investing more capital with projected rates of return that, although well below the cost of capital, are higher than the after‐tax cost of debt. Stock compensation has been the conventional solution to the first problem because it's a discounted cash flow value that is assumed to discourage actions that sacrifice future earnings. Economic profit—in its most popular manifestation, EVA—has been the conventional solution to the second problem with earnings because it includes a capital charge that penalizes low‐return investment. But neither of these conventional solutions appears to work very well in practice. Stock compensation isn't tied to business unit performance—and often fails to provide the intended incentives for the (many) corporate managers who believe that meeting current consensus earnings is more important than investing to maintain future earnings. EVA doesn't work well when new investments take time to become profitable because the higher capital charge comes before the related income. In this article, the author presents two new operating performance measures that are likely to work better than either earnings or EVA because they reflect the value that can be lost either through corporate underinvestment or overinvestment designed to increase current earnings. Both of these new measures are based on the math that ties EVA to discounted cash flow value, particularly its division of current corporate market values into two components: “current operations value” and “future growth value.” The key to the effectiveness of the new measures in explaining changes in company stock prices and market values is a statistical model of changes in future growth value that captures the expected effects of significant increases in current investment in R&D and advertising on future profits and value.     

Expectations‐Based Management

The authors begin by summarizing the results of their recently published study of the relation between stock returns and changes in several annual performance measures, including not only growth in earnings and EVA, but changes during the year in analysts' expectations about future earnings over three different periods: (1) the current year; (2) the following year; and (3) the three‐year period thereafter. The last of these measures—changes in analysts' expectations about three‐ to five‐year earnings—had by far the greatest explanatory “power” of any of the measures tested. Besides being consistent with the stock market's taking a long‐term, DCF approach to the valuation of companies, the authors' finding that investors seem to care most about earnings three to five years down the road has a number of important implications for financial management: First, a business unit doesn't necessarily create shareholder value if its return on capital exceeds the weighted average cost of capital—nor does an operation that fails to earn its WACC necessarily reduce value. To create value, the business's return must exceed what investors are expecting. Second, without forecasting returns on capital, management should attempt to give investors a clear sense of the firm's internal benchmarks, both for existing businesses and new investment. Third, management incentive plans should be based on stock ownership rather than stock options. Precisely because stock prices reflect expectations, the potential for prices to get ahead of realities gives options‐laden managers a strong temptation to manipulate earnings and manage for the short term.     

Postmodern Corporate Finance

One of the core tenets of modern finance theory is that corporations create value by producing operating rates of return on capital that are greater than the cost of capital. “Postmodern” corporate finance, while reaffirming the importance of earning an adequate return on capital, also attempts to restore at least part of the traditional corporate emphasis on top-line growth that prevailed before the intense focus on returns by modern shareholder value advocates. One important reason for the heightened emphasis on growth in addition to returns is that most rate-of-return measures used by companies and investors are based on conservative accounting practices that make old assets look more profitable than new ones, thereby discouraging investments in growth. This article introduces a new return measure called “Gross Business Return” that, when evaluated against a Required Return framework that reflects the level of current stock prices, has a stronger correlation with how companies are valued by the stock market. Moreover, in reviewing historical returns over time for both the market and specific industries, the author's research suggests that the market appears to demand considerably lower current returns than those implied by traditional weighted average cost of capital (WACC) approaches. And to the extent corporate executives rely on WACC, they could be passing up valuable growth opportunities. To help evaluate tradeoffs between growth and return, the author introduces a cash-based measure of corporate economic profit called Residual Cash Earnings. Unlike most traditional return and economic profit measures, Residual Cash Earnings, when expressed as a percentage of sales, provides a way for corporate managers to identify growth opportunities that, while producing current returns lower than WACC, are likely to add value over a multi-year time horizon. These new measures and analytical tools are suitable for strategic planning, budgeting, resource allocation, performance measurement, and rewards. Consistent application of these principles across these management processes provides a framework for constantly rebalancing the emphasis on growth and return to adapt to changes in the economy, industry, and competitive landscape.     

Value‐Added Per Share (VAPS): A Value‐Relevant Corporate Performance Metric

The authors introduce Value Added Per Share (VAPS) as a value‐relevant metric that is intended to complement earnings per share (EPS) in helping corporate managers and analysts understand and overcome the limitations of GAAP‐based reporting. VAPS discounts a firm's past and projected cash flows at its “cost of capital,” allowing companies to avoid the subjective accounting accrual process and other practices that often make EPS misleading. A company's VAPS is calculated in three main steps: (1) estimate the change in the capitalized value of after‐tax operating cash flow by taking the net change (plus or minus) of the firm's operating cash flow after taxes and dividing that number by the firm's cost of capital; (2) subtract total investment expenditures; and (3) divide by the number of shares outstanding. By capitalizing the change in after‐tax operating cash flow, one finds the net change in a firm's current operations value. By subtracting investment expenditures from that change in current operations value, the analyst gets a clearer picture of the benefit to shareholders net of the funds used to create that benefit. Consistent with basic theory, VAPS is positive when a company earns a return at least equal to its cost of capital and negative otherwise. Because of their fundamental differences, EPS and VAPS are likely to send different signals, and VAPS is expected to provide greater insight into stock price changes. The authors provide the findings of statistical tests showing the superior explanatory power of VAPS and recommend that companies publish statements of VAPS along with standard GAAP results, especially since the former can be readily calculated using the available income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement data.     

The Evolution of Executive Pay Policy at General Motors, 1918–2008

This article documents the gradual movement of General Motors away from the partnership concept that dominated U.S. corporate pay policy in the first half of the 20th century and toward the “competitive pay” concepts that have prevailed since then. The partnership concept was achieved by paying managers bonuses in the form of GM shares, with the amounts paid out of a single company‐wide bonus pool and based on a fixed share of profit (after subtracting a charge for the cost of capital). Thanks to this “EVA‐like” bonus scheme, GM's managers effectively became “partners” with the company's shareholders, sharing the wealth in good times but also the pain in troubled times. What's more, the authors also show that, from the establishment of the program in 1918 through the 1950s, the directors went to great lengths—including several bouts of innovative (and often complex) problem‐solving—to achieve their compensation objectives while maintaining such fixed‐share bonuses. But the sharing philosophy and associated compensation practices were gradually supplanted by competitive pay practices from the 1960s onward. The authors show that by the late 1970s, GM had a board of directors with modest shareholdings, in contrast to the board in the early post‐war period, whose directors had large stakes. As a consequence, directors began acting less like stewards of capital and more like employees whose financial rewards came not from returns on GM's stock but from the fees they received for their services. This fundamental change in board compensation almost certainly contributed to the gradual abandonment of fixed‐profit sharing for GM's managers. In its place, the board implemented competitive pay policies that, while coming to dominate executive pay policy in the U.S. and abroad, have largely divorced executive pay from changes in shareholder wealth. In the case of GM, this growing separation of pay from performance was accompanied by a significant decline in corporate returns on operating capital as well as stock returns over time.     

DETERMINING COST OF SALES IN THE CCA SYSTEM

The profit concept in the Current Cost Accounting system is based on the objective of maintaining “capital” in the sense of “operating capability”. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the recommended capital maintenance adjustment of the Australian Provisional Accounting Standard on “Current Cost Accounting”, as it relates to cost of sales, is inappropriate for the stated capital maintenance objective. This appears to be because operating capability is a dated concept, since it is the operating capability existing at the beginning of an accounting period which is to be maintained. An alternative adjustment for cost of sales is proposed which is consistent with the stated capital maintenance objective.     

Capital Structure Instability

This article summarizes the evidence from the authors’ recent study published in the Journal of Finance that documented the extent of the variation in the capital structures of individual public companies over long time horizons. It also reports the results of an exploratory investigation into the sources of variation over time in leverage ratios—an investigation that included case analyses of leverage instability at 24 U.S. companies that were included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average at some point in their histories. The main finding of the authors’ study is that substantial instability in leverage has been the norm at publicly held nonfinancial companies. “Episodic” cases of leverage stability were observed from time to time, but they were the exception, not the rule. Such cases almost always involved companies with low leverage ratios, and they invariably proved to be short‐lived, rarely exceeding a decade or two. Leverage was found to be “sticky” during periods lasting just a few years, but a company's currently high (or low) leverage became an increasingly poor predictor of whether its future leverage would be high (or low) as the amount of time between leverage observations lengthened. When attempting to explain companyspecific changes in leverage after extended periods of stability, the authors found a strong connection with company expansion and investment. At the same time, they found no systematic relations between company‐specific leverage changes and changes in industry leverage, company profitability, or other determinants of leverage that have been emphasized in previous academic studies. The authors' case analyses reinforced their finding that capital structure changes were often linked to the funding of company expansions, but such changes were also sometimes designed to support established payout policies while preserving financing flexibility.     

The Growing Blessing of Unicorns: The Changing Nature of the Market for Privately Funded Companies

The past 15 years have seen the emergence of large infusions of private capital at levels previously accessible only in public markets. One direct effect of these non‐public fundraisings is the spawning of private entities with market valuations reaching $1 billion, thereby achieving the status of unicorns. As the authors reported in an earlier study, by the end of 2015, there were 142 unicorns with an aggregate value exceeding $500 billion. The conviction of many investors and managers at that time was that these companies could best create value by staying private, often by adopting governance structures focused on creating superior operating performance. It was also widely believed that unicorns would remain outside the public markets longer and succeed in attracting even more private capital, thereby enabling their investors to capture a greater share of the increase in company value. In this study, the authors examine how the characteristics and dynamics of “the blessing” have changed in the past five years. Despite the widespread view that the valuations and private financing trend fueling this market were not sustainable, the authors report that by March 2020, the “net” number of unicorns had grown from 142 to 464, a number that doesn't reflect the transformation of over half of the 2015 sample through acquisition or public offering and their replacement by new unicorns. Further, the cumulative market valuation of unicorns more than doubled from $500 billion to $1.37 trillion, representing growth far greater than that in the public equity markets (some 26% per annum, as compared to 9% for the S&P 500) over the same period—and the blessing has become more diversified, both in terms of industry and geographical location. The authors also consider what happens when unicorns “graduate” to a different organizational form by means of an IPO, private buyout, or business failure. Analyzing the 107 firms that departed the sample between 2015 and 2020, the authors report that the average lifespan of a unicorn from its founding date to its exit date has been 9.5 years, indicating that such firms indeed remain privately owned for a longer time than in the past. Additionally, the study finds that the founders and initial investors in unicorns have fared quite well, cashing out their initial investment at almost six times invested capital, on average. These private investment performance metrics have been significantly higher than the returns to public shareholders in the same firms during the post‐IPO period, signifying that unicorn investors have captured much more of the value created in the company's growth phase than public stockholders.     

EQT: Private Equity with a Purpose

The primary factors driving the remarkable growth of private equity have been the industry's attractive and stable returns in combination with its active ownership model. Nevertheless, critics have been questioning whether the PE industry can maintain its historic returns, and challenging its fee and incentive structures as well as its notable lack of transparency and diversity. And the alleged systemic effects of the industry on social problems like income inequality and climate change have become large enough to create a perceived threat to PE's long‐term “license to operate.” In this article, the authors discuss the commitment of EQT, the publicly listed and Stockholm‐headquartered private markets firm (and eighth largest PE fundraiser in the world), to the “future‐proofing” of both its portfolio companies and the company itself. The company envisions itself as undertaking a “journey” toward sustainability and positive impact and, in so doing, furnishing a model that other PE firms might find useful in helping “future‐proof” the entire industry. As part of that commitment, EQT recently published a “Statement of Purpose” signed by its the board of directors that focuses a societal impact lens on its entire portfolio of companies and assets, reinforces its public commitments to diversity and other “clean and conscious” practices, and aims to leverage digital technologies to enhance financial returns and real‐world outcomes. Transparency and a mindset focused on achieving positive impact are the keys to PE's earning high and stable returns and to securing its long‐term license to operate.     

超预期股本扩张与分析师每股盈余预测

卖方分析师的每股盈余预测在实证文献中被广泛使用。该指标同时依赖于分析师对目标公司未来净利润的预测和对目标公司未来股本数量的预测。因此,如果在分析师发布预测后,目标公司的股本数量发生超出分析师预期的扩张,则每股盈余预测将无法代表分析师对目标公司未来基本面的预测。本文构建了“调整后每股盈余预测”指标,该指标可剔除超预期股本扩张对每股盈余预测的影响,真实反映分析师对目标公司未来基本面的预测。本文应用该指标,在两个具体的实证研究场景中证明了,忽略超预期股本扩张的影响可能得出错误的实证结论。本文还进一步指出了三个忽略超预期股本扩张的影响可能导致错误实证结果的研究场景。     

超预期股本扩张与分析师每股盈余预测

卖方分析师的每股盈余预测在实证文献中被广泛使用。该指标同时依赖于分析师对目标公司未来净利润的预测和对目标公司未来股本数量的预测。因此,如果在分析师发布预测后,目标公司的股本数量发生超出分析师预期的扩张,则每股盈余预测将无法代表分析师对目标公司未来基本面的预测。本文构建了“调整后每股盈余预测”指标,该指标可剔除超预期股本扩张对每股盈余预测的影响,真实反映分析师对目标公司未来基本面的预测。本文应用该指标,在两个具体的实证研究场景中证明了,忽略超预期股本扩张的影响可能得出错误的实证结论。本文还进一步指出了三个忽略超预期股本扩张的影响可能导致错误实证结果的研究场景。     

Enterprise Risk Management: Theory and Practice

The Chief Risk Officer of Nationwide Insurance teams up with a distinguished academic to discuss the benefits and challenges associated with the design and implementation of an enterprise risk management program. The authors begin by arguing that a carefully designed ERM program—one in which all material corporate risks are viewed and managed within a single framework—can be a source of long‐run competitive advantage and value through its effects at both a “macro” or company‐wide level and a “micro” or business‐unit level. At the macro level, ERM enables senior management to identify, measure, and limit to acceptable levels the net exposures faced by the firm. By managing such exposures mainly with the idea of cushioning downside outcomes and protecting the firm's credit rating, ERM helps maintain the firm's access to capital and other resources necessary to implement its strategy and business plan. At the micro level, ERM adds value by ensuring that all material risks are “owned,” and risk‐return tradeoffs carefully evaluated, by operating managers and employees throughout the firm. To this end, business unit managers at Nationwide are required to provide information about major risks associated with all new capital projects—information that can then used by senior management to evaluate the marginal impact of the projects on the firm's total risk. And to encourage operating managers to focus on the risk‐return tradeoffs in their own businesses, Nationwide's periodic performance evaluations of its business units attempt to refl ect their contributions to total risk by assigning risk‐adjusted levels of “imputed” capital on which project managers are expected to earn adequate returns. The second, and by far the larger, part of the article provides an extensive guide to the process and major challenges that arise when implementing ERM, along with an account of Nationwide's approach to dealing with them. Among other issues, the authors discuss how a company should assess its risk “appetite,” measure how much risk it is bearing, and decide which risks to retain and which to transfer to others. Consistent with the principle of comparative advantage it uses to guide such decisions, Nationwide attempts to limit “non‐core” exposures, such as interest rate and equity risk, thereby enlarging the firm's capacity to bear the “information‐intensive, insurance‐ specific” risks at the core of its business and competencies.     

Valuing Companies with Cash‐Flow@Risk

The classic DCF approach to capital budgeting—the one that MBA students in the world's top business schools have been taught for the last 30 years—begins with the assumption that the corporate investment decision is “independent of” the financing decision. That is, the value of a given investment opportunity should not be affected by how a company is financed, whether mainly with debt or with equity. A corollary of this capital structure “irrelevance” proposition says that a company's investment decision should also not be influenced by its risk management policy—by whether a company hedges its various price exposures or chooses to leave them unhedged. In this article, the authors—one of whom is the CFO of the French high‐tech firm Gemalto—propose a practical alternative to DCF that is based on a concept they call “cash‐flow@risk.” Implementation of the concept involves dividing expected future cash flow into two components: a low‐risk part, or “certainty equivalent,” and a high‐risk part. The two cash flow streams are discounted at different rates (corresponding to debt and equity) when estimating their value. The concept of cash‐flow@risk derives directly from, and is fully consistent with, the concept of economic capital that was developed by Robert Merton and Andre Perold in the early 1990s and that has become the basis of Value at Risk (or VaR) capital allocation systems now used at most financial institutions. But because the approach in this article focuses on the volatility of operating cash flows instead of asset values, the authors argue that an internal capital allocation system based on cash‐flow@risk is likely to be much more suitable than VaR for industrial companies.     

EVA® FOR BANKS: VALUE CREATION, RISK MANAGEMENT, AND PROFITABILITY MEASUREMENT

This article presents a complete ranking of America's 100 largest bank holding companies according to their shareholder value added. This research, the first of its kind for the banking industry, defines an EVA measurement for banks and presents evidence of EVA's stronger correlation with bank market values than traditional accounting measures like ROA and ROE. Besides developing EVA and MVA as analytical tools for viewing the economic performance of the organization from a shareholder perspective, the authors also present a framework for calculating EVA at all levels of the organization, including lines of business, functional departments, products, customer segments, and customer relationships. The implementation of an EVA profitability measurement system at the business unit (or lower) level requires methods for three critical tasks: (1) transfer pricing of funds; (2) allocation of indirect expenses; and (3) allocation of economic capital. Although solutions to the first two are fairly straightforward, the allocation of capital to business units is a major challenge for banks today. In contrast to the complex, “bottom-up” approach used by a number of large banks in implementing their RAROC systems, the authors propose a greatly simplified, “top-down” approach that requires calculation of only the volatility of a business's operating profit (or NOPAT). The advantage of using NOPAT volatility is that it allows EVA analysis at any level of the organization in a way that captures the volatility effects from all sources of risk (credit, interest rates, liquidity, or operations). While such a top-down approach is clearly not meant to take the place of a comprehensive, bottom-up RAROC analysis, it is intended to provide a complement–a high-level “check” on the detailed, bottom-up risk management procedures and controls now in place at most banks. Moreover, for those banks that have developed extensive funds transfer pricing, cost allocation, and RAROCstyle capital allocation systems, the EVA financial management system can either be integrated with those systems or serve as an independent economic assessment of the bank's business risks and returns.     

Risk Management and the Cost of Capital for Operating Assets

This article attempts to clarify the effect of risk management on a company's cost of capital in the spirit of the traditional M&M/CAPM model. The traditional cost of capital model can and should be used to find the hurdle rate for a company's operating assets, since it can be applied regardless of the composition of the firm's non‐operating assets or its risk management policy. The author's main message is that if a firm manages idiosyncratic risk, the correct cost of capital for the operating investment is not the firm's enterprise WACC, but rather the required return on the assets being funded. Using the case of a company with a single line of business that is evaluating an investment opportunity, the author demonstrates how to adjust the firm's overall WACC to find the cost of capital for the operating assets to be acquired.     

权益资本成本的行业特征研究

以2004~2011年沪深A股上市公司为样本,研究权益资本成本的行业差异以及行业特征对权益资本成本的影响。研究发现:行业门类层面和制造业次类层面的权益资本成本差异显著,这种差异在时序上较为稳定。行业竞争程度越低,权益资本成本越小,体现了产品市场竞争的特质性风险效应,行业收益波动和行业成长性分别对权益资本成本产生显著的正向影响和负向影响。企业会计准则的改革强化了行业因素对权益资本成本的影响。     

Drivers of Shareholder Returns in Tech Industries (or How to Make Sense of Amazon's Market Value)

Earnings according to GAAP do a notoriously poor job of explaining the current values of the most successful high‐tech companies, which in recent years have experienced remarkable growth in revenues and market capitalizations. But if GAAP earnings fail to account for the values of such companies, are there other measures that do better? The authors address this question in two main ways. They begin by summarizing the findings of their recent study of both the operating and the stock‐market performance of 169 publicly traded tech companies (with market caps of at least $1 billion). The aim of the study was to identify which of the many indicators of corporate operating performance—including growth in revenues, EBITDA margins, and returns on equity—have had the strongest correlation with shareholder returns over a relatively long period of time. The study's main conclusion is that investors appear to be looking for signs of neither growth nor efficiency in using capital alone, but for an optimal mix or balancing of those goals. And that mix, as the study also suggests, is captured in a cash‐flow‐based variant of “residual income” the authors call “residual cash earnings,” or RCE. In the second part of their article, the authors show how and why RCE does a much better job than reported net income or EPS of explaining the current market value of Amazon.com , one of the best‐performing tech companies in the world. Mainly by treating R&D spending as an investment of capital rather than an expense, RCE reveals the value of a company that is distinguished by both the amount and the productivity of its ongoing investment—both of which have been obscured by GAAP.     

CREATING VALUE IN THE OIL INDUSTRY

In contrast with current thinking that conglomerates are inefficient, this article begins by presenting arguments in favor of the size and structure of the large integrated oil companies, also known as "the supermajors." Among the advantages are tax efficiency, information flow, political and technological know-how, broad supplier and customer relationships, scale economies, cross-business economies of scope, brand power, and the ability to coordinate strategic initiatives across businesses. These advantages all translate into a lower cost of capital.
One problem, however, is that this lower cost of capital does not seem to be reflected in the target returns on capital currently set by the supermajors. Observing that the financial goal of a corporation is to maximize not its return on capital but rather the net present value of expected future cash flows and earnings, the authors argue that the majors need to make two major changes to current practice. First, their investment hurdle rates should be reduced from their current level of 14–15% to the weighted average cost of capital, which is estimated to run about 8–9%. Second, the actual returns on capital reported in published accounts are largely meaningless; and when evaluating new investments and existing operations alike, the companies must find an annual performance measure that better reflects the economic realities of the business. This paper recommends use of a performance measurement framework based on economic profit that should serve two critical purposes: it will encourage managers to undertake all value-increasing projects (not just those that will maintain or increase reported return on capital), and it will help the companies communicate their strategy and results to the investment community.