The Weighted Average Cost of Capital, Perfect Capital Markets, and Project Life: A Clarification

James A. Miles and John R. Ezzell

Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 1980, vol. 15, issue 3, 719-730

Abstract: For financial management to make wealth maximizing capital budgeting decisions, a model that will determine correctly the market value of a project's levered cash flows is required. A capital budgeting model should account not only for the effects of the investment decision, but also for the effects of the financing decision and the interactions between the two decisions. In perfect capital markets all the effects of the financing decision pertain to the tax shield created by debt financing. Thus, as originally shown by Modigliani and Miller [8], the value of a project's levered cash flow stream equals the market value the stream would have if it were unlevered plus the market value of the stream of tax savings on interest payments associated with the debt employed to finance the project. While this result is completely general with respect to the specific processes utilized by the market to value the two components, MM specified the value of the unlevered component as the present value of the unlevered cash flows discounted at the appropriate risk adjusted unlevered cost of capital and they specified the value of the tax savings component as the present value of the tax shield on interest discounted at the cost of debt. Accordingly, the value of a project's levered cash flows is specified as the sum of these two present values, one representing the effects of the investment decision and the other capturing the effects of the financing decision. The MM valuation model has been extended to normative capital budgeting analysis by Myers [9] in terms of the adjusted present value (APV) model.

Date: 1980
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