Unlevered betas and the cost of equity capital: An empirical approach

Julio Sarmiento-Sabogal*, Mehdi Sadeghi

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The present paper calculates the systematic risk within the context of the capital asset pricing model to investigate the significance of financial leverage on systematic risk. Rather than testing the unlevered beta directly, we develop a multinomial model with theoretically predicted targets in the unleveraged/leveraged process. We find that including tax shields in this process is statistically more robust than omitting them. Our results also suggest that the use of the proxy levered beta to address the lack of market information for both non-traded firms and individual business units is not misleading.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)90-105
Number of pages16
JournalThe North American Journal of Economics and Finance: a journal of financial economics studies
Volume30
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2014

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