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CHAPTER 14
COST OF CAPITAL

Answers to Concepts Review and Critical Thinking Questions

1. It is the minimum rate of return the firm must earn overall on its existing assets. If it earns more than this, value is created.

2. Book values for debt are likely to be much closer to market values than are equity book values.

3. No. The cost of capital depends on the risk of the project, not the source of the money.

4. Interest expense is tax-deductible. There is no difference between pretax and aftertax equity costs.

5. The primary advantage of the DCF model is its simplicity. The method is disadvantaged in that (1) the model is applicable only to firms that actually pay dividends; many do not; (2) even if a firm does pay …show more content…

10. If the different operating divisions were in much different risk classes, then separate cost of capital figures should be used for the different divisions; the use of a single, overall cost of capital would be inappropriate. If the single hurdle rate were used, riskier divisions would tend to receive funds for investment projects, since their return would exceed the hurdle rate despite the fact that they may actually plot below the SML and, hence, be unprofitable projects on a risk-adjusted basis. The typical problem encountered in estimating the cost of capital for a division is that it rarely has its own securities traded on the market, so it is difficult to observe the market’s valuation of the risk of the division. Two typical ways around this are to use a pure play proxy for the division, or to use subjective adjustments of the overall firm hurdle rate based on the perceived risk of the division.

Solutions to Questions and Problems

NOTE: All end of chapter problems were solved using a spreadsheet. Many problems require multiple steps. Due to space and readability constraints, when these intermediate steps are included in this solutions manual, rounding may appear to have occurred. However, the final answer for each problem is found without rounding during any step in the problem.

Basic

1. With the information given, we can find the cost of equity using the dividend growth model. Using this model, the cost of

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