The potential advantages of the market-value approach have long been appreciated; yet analytical results have been meager. What appears to be keeping this line of development from achieving its promise is largely the lack of an adequate theory of the effect of financial structure on market valuations, and of how these effects can be inferred from objective market data. It is with the development of such a theory and of its implications for the cost-of-capital problem that we shall be concerned in this paper. Our procedure will be to develop in Section I the basic theory itself and to give some brief account of its empirical relevance. In Section II we show how the theory can be used to answer the cost-of-capital questions and how it permits us to develop a theory of investment of the firm under conditions of uncertainty. Throughout these sections the approach is essentially a partial-equilibrium one focusing on the firm and "industry". Accordingly, the "prices" of certain income streams will be treated as constant and given from outside the model, just as in the standard Marshallian analysis of the firm and industry the prices of all inputs and of all other products are taken as given. We have chosen to focus at this level rather than on the economy as a whole because it is at firm and the industry that the interests of the various specialists concerned with the cost-of-capital problem come most closely together. Although the emphasis has thus been placed on partial-equilibrium analysis, the results obtained also provide the essential building block for a general equilibrium model which shows how those prices which are here taken as given, are themselves determined. For reasons of space, however, and because the material is of interest in its own right, the presentation of the general equilibrium model which rounds out the analysis must be deferred to a subsequent paper.

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The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance and the Theory of Investment

The behavior of stock market prices

In the hope that it may help to overcome these obstacles to effective empirical testing, this paper will attempt to fill the existing gap in the theoretical literature on valuation. We shall begin, in Section I , by examining the effects the effects of differences in dividend policy on the current price of shares in an ideal economy characterized by perfect capital markets, rational behavior, and perfect certainty. Still within this convenient analytical framework we shall go on in Section II and III to consider certain closely related issues that appear to have been responsible for considerable misunderstanding of the role of dividend policy. In particular, Section II will focus on the longstanding debate about what investors "really" capitalize when they buy shares; and Section III on the much mooted relations between price, the rate of growth of profits, and the rate of dividends per share. Once these fundamentals have been established, we shall proceed in Section IV to drop the assumption of certainty and to see the extent to which the earlier conclusions about dividend policy must be modified. Finally, in Section V , we shall briefly examine the implications for the dividend policy problem of certain kinds of market imperfections.

/pdf/dividend-policy-growth-and-the-valuation-of-shares-3rg3wfs2am.pdf

Dividend Policy, Growth, and the Valuation of Shares

The Capital Structure Puzzle Author(s): Stewart C. Myers Source: The Journal of Finance, Vol. 39, No. 3, Papers and Proceedings, Forty-Second Annual Meeting, American Finance Association, San Francisco, CA, December 28-30, 1983 (Jul., 1984), pp. 575-592 Published by: Blackwell Publishing for the American Finance Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2327916 Accessed: 29/10/2008 12:03

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1984.tb03646.x

The Capital Structure Puzzle

There is an impressive body of empirical evidence which indicates that successive price changes in individual common stocks are very nearly independent. Recent papers by Mandelbrot and Samuelson show rigorously that independence of successive price changes is consistent with an "efficient" market, i.e., a market that adjusts rapidly to new information. It is important to note, however, that in the empirical work to date the usual procedure has been to infer market efficiency from the observed independence of successive price changes. There has been very little actual testing of the speed of adjustment of prices to specijc kinds of new information. The prime concern of this paper is to examine the process by which common stock prices adjust to the information (if any) that is implicit in a stock split

/pdf/the-adjustment-of-stock-prices-to-new-information-4xp903ssp0.pdf

The Adjustment of Stock Prices to New Information

Distribution of Incomes of Corporations Among Dividens, Retained Earnings, and Taxes Author(s): John Lintner Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 46, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Sixtyeighth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, (May, 1956), pp. 97-113 Published by: American Economic Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1910664 Accessed: 26/06/2008 14:06

J Lintner

Papers

Distribution of incomes of corporations among dividends, retained earnings and taxes