Debt Policy, Corporate Taxes, and Discount Rates

35 Pages Posted: 21 Nov 2002 Last revised: 24 Jul 2022

See all articles by Mark Grinblatt

Mark Grinblatt

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Finance Area; Yale University - International Center for Finance; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Jun Liu

University of California, San Diego (UCSD) - Rady School of Management

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: November 2002

Abstract

This paper studies the valuation of assets with debt tax shields when debt policy is a general time-dependent function of the asset's unlevered cash flows, value, and history. In a continuous-time setting, it shows that the value of a project's debt tax shield satisfies a partial differential equation, which simplifies to an easily solved ordinary differential equation for most plausible debt policies. A large class of cases exhibits closed-form solutions for the value of a levered asset, the value of its tax shield, and the appropriate tax-adjusted cost of capital for discounting unlevered cash flows.

Suggested Citation

Grinblatt, Mark and Liu, Jun, Debt Policy, Corporate Taxes, and Discount Rates (November 2002). NBER Working Paper No. w9353, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=353763

Mark Grinblatt (Contact Author)

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Finance Area ( email )

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Yale University - International Center for Finance

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Jun Liu

University of California, San Diego (UCSD) - Rady School of Management ( email )

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United States
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