Damodaran

By Nihan 8 Min Read

My name is Aswath Damodaran, and I teach corporate finance and valuation at the Stern School of Business at New York University. I am a teacher first, who also happens to love untangling the puzzles of corporate finance and valuation, and writing about my experiences. As a result, I am at the intersection of three businesses, education, publishing and financial services, that are all big, inefficiently run and deserve to be disrupted. I may not have the power to change the status quo in any of these businesses, but I can stir the pot, and this website is my attempt to do so.

Broadly speaking, the website is broken down into four sections. The first, teaching, includes all of my classes, starting with the MBA classes that I teach at Stern and including the shorter (2-day to 3-day) executive sessions I have on corporate finance and valuation. You will find not only the material for the classes (lecture notes, quizzes), but also webcasts of the classes that you can access on different platforms. I also have classes specifically tailored to an online audience on valuation, corporate finance and investment philosophies, as well as my quirky versions of accounting and statistics classes.

The second, writing, includes links to almost everything I have written and continue to write, starting with my books and extending to my practitioner papers (on equity risk premiums, cash flows and other things valuation-related). The third, data, contains the annual updates that I provide on industry averages, for US and global companies, on both corporate finance and valuation metrics (including multiples).

It is also where I provide my estimates of equity risk premiums and costs of capital. The fourth, tools, incorporates the spreadsheets that I have developed over time to value and analyze companies and short in-practice webcasts on how to analyze companies. (If you have trouble with any of the links, try a different browser, since Google Chrome, in particular, seems to have developed an aversion to downloads on my site.)

I have been told that my website is ugly, and I apologize for its clunky look and feel. While some of you have offered to make it look better for me, and I thank you for your kindness, I need to be able to tweak, modify and adapt the website as I go along and to do that, I have to work with what I know about website design, which is not much. You can try the search engine below and if that does not work, try this guide to the site.

Damodaran

Equity Risk Premiums (Data, Updates and Papers)

Implied ERP on August 1, 2023= 4.38% (Trailing 12 month, with adjusted payout); 4.83% (Trailing 12 month cash yield); 5.70% (Average CF yield last 10 years); 4.62% (Net cash yield); 4.29% (Normalized Earnings & Payout)

Implied ERP in previous month =4.59% (Trailing 12 month, with adjusted payout); 5.00% (Trailing 12 month cash yield); 5.90% (Average CF yield last 10 years); 4.78% (Net cash yield); 4.44% (Normalized Earnings & Payout)

Downloadable datasets (For more data, go here)

Historical Returns on Stocks, Bonds, Real Estate and Gold (for historical risk premiums)
Implied ERP by month for previous months (September 2008- Current)
Implied ERP (annual) from 1960 to Current
My data on ERP & CRP by country (January 2023 and July 2023)

Downloadable spreadsheets (For more spreadsheets, go here)

Papers: Starting in 2008, I have written annual update papers on equity risk premiums, in two installments. The first one looks at equity risk premiums, in general, starting with their determinants and working through different approaches to measuring htem. The second one is more focused on country risk. The latest updates for both can be found below:

Other Updates

Teaching:

Stern Classes: The Spring 2023 Corporate Finance class, now fully archived, can be found here and the archived Spring 2023 Valuation class is linked here.
Online classes (Free and NYU Certificate): The online versions of these classes can be found here and NYU is offering certificate versions here. In the next academic year, I will be teaching all three classes again and you can find the links to them here.
Short Prep Courses: If you need a short brush up on the basics of finance, I have added a class on the foundations of finance as well as a minimalist accounting class to my online list. In 2021, I added a statistics class to the mix, again taught from the perspective of someone who uses statistics rather than a statistical expert.

Writing:

Papers/Articles: This paper on valuing Tesla (with Brad Cornell) won the readers’ award (Bernstein-Levy) in The Journal of Portfolio Management. Brad and I have written a paper on what we call the big market delusion, on how the allure of big markets coupled with overconfident entrepreneurs/investors can create over pricing across companies. In 2020, we added a paper on ESG, a concept that has been oversold and overhyped by its proponents, as well as a paper on value investing’s travails in the last decade. I also have a paper on valuing users, subscribers and members. In 2020, I also wrote a series of fourteen posts on the COVID crisis, with the emphasis on markets, in real time, which I put together as a paper (way too long) on what I learned and unlearned. I also added a paper on the disruption coming to the IPO process. For a complete list of papers, go here
Books: My book on Narrative and Numbers, from Columbia University Press, is in bookstores and the third edition of The Dark Side of Valuation came out in 2018. My book on Corporate Life Cycles, where I look at where a firm stands in its life cycle affects corporate finance, investing and valuartion judgments, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.

Data: The latest overall data update was on January 5, 2023; my next one will be in January 2024. My country risk premiums also get updated midyear; my July 2023 update is now available here. Check under data for downloads and links, as well as archived data from prior years.

Tools: Check under tools for additions to spreadsheets and webcast. uValue is available at the iTunes store.