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Still Many Ways to Skin a Capital Cost

Harvard Business Review

When executives evaluate a potential investment, whether it's to build a new plant, enter a new market, or acquire a company, they weigh its cost against the future cash flows they expect will spring from it. To make sure they're comparing apples to apples, they discount those future cash flows to arrive at their net present value.

CAPM 14
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The Most Common Mistake People Make In Calculating ROI

Harvard Business Review

Sure, you may know this already, but people who haven’t studied finance often find this statement confusing. Finance & Accounting Tool. It’s where your company’s finance department will ask the toughest questions and scrutinize your estimates and assumptions most carefully. Excerpted from. Joe Knight.

ROI 8
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What Private Equity Investors Think They Do for the Companies They Buy

Harvard Business Review

In a survey of 79 PE firms managing more than $750 billion in capital, we provide granular information on PE managers’ practices and how firms’ strategies relate to the characteristics of their founders. In particular, we are interested in how many of their responses correlate with what academic finance knows and what it teaches.

CAPM 8
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How CMOs Can Get CFOs on Their Side

Harvard Business Review

This lack of an analytical approach has traditionally formed a barrier between marketing and finance. CFOs are more interested in capital investment estimates, net present values, and a clear outline of the trade-offs of any investment. They’re going to make ads and do whatever it is they do. Ask for the CFO’s help.

CFO 8
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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 Lars has taken some of these ideas and applied them in finance.

CAPM 8