Counterfactual conditionals are cognitive tools that we incessantly use during our lives for judgments, evaluations, decisions. Counterfactuals are used for defining concepts as well; an instance of this is attested by the notions of opportunity cost and excess profit (residual income), two...

This paper deals with the use of the CAPM for capital budgeting purposes. Four different measures are deductively drawn from this model: the disequilibrium Net Present Value, the equilibrium Net Present Value, the disequilibrium Net Future Value, the equilibrium Net Future Value. While all of...

A residual-income model, named Systemic Value Added (SVA), is proposed for decision-making purposes, based on a systemic approach introduced in Magni (2000, 2003, 2004). The model translates the notion of residual income (excess profit) giving formal expression to a counterfactual alternative...

This paper deals with the CAPM-derived capital budgeting criterion, and in particular with Rubinstein’s (1973) criterion, according to which a project is profitable if the project rate of return is greater than the risk-adjusted cost of capital, where the latter depends on the project’s...

This paper shows that a decision maker using the CAPM for valuing firms and making decisions may contradict Modigliani and Miller’s Proposition I, if he adopts the widely-accepted disequilibrium NPV. As a consequence, CAPM-minded agents employing this NPV are open to arbitrage losses and miss...

This paper presents an axiomatization of residual income, aka excess profit, and illustrates how it may univocally engenders fixed-income or variable-income assets. In the first part it is shown that, depending on the relations between excess profit and the investor's excess wealth, a...

This paper proposes a new way of decomposing net present values and net final values in periodic shares. Such a decomposition generates a new notion of residual income, radically different from the classical one available in the financial and accounting literature. While the standard residual...

This paper presents a new way of valuing firms and measuring residual income. The method, originally introduced in Magni (2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2001), is here renamed lost-capital paradigm. In order to enhance comprehension the presentation relies on a very simple numerical example which shows...

In capital budgeting, the internal rate of return (IRR) criterion and the net present value (NPV) criterion are considered incompatible in several cases. A longstanding debate developed in past years about the reliability of either method is still an issue of investigation (see, for example,...

Practitioners and academics in valuation include changes in liquid assets (potential dividends) in the cash flows. This widespread and wrong practice is inconsistent with basic finance theory. We present economic, theoretical, and empirical arguments to support the thesis. Economic arguments...