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Journal of Corporate Finance Vol. 37 2016

Political risk and international valuation

Geert Bekaert1,2; Campbell R. Harvey1,3; Christian Lundblad4; Stephan Siegel5

1 National Bureau of Economic Research · 2 Columbia University · 3 Duke University · 4 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · 5 University of Washington

Abstract

Measuring the impact of political risk on investment projects is one of the most vexing issues in international business. One popular approach is to assume that the sovereign yield spread captures political risk and to augment the project discount rate by this spread. We show that this approach is flawed. While the sovereign spread is influenced by political risk, it also reflects other risks that are likely included in the valuation analysis — leading to the double counting of risks. We propose to use “political risk spreads” to undo the double counting in the evaluation of international investment projects.

DOI
10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2015.12.007
Volume
37
Pages
1-23
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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