Modigliani & Miller Summary

If a company's variable costs are higher than its fixed costs, the company is said to be using less operating leverage.

Higher leverage is very likely to create value for a firm considering capital structure change by exerting financial discipline and more efficient corporate strategy changes.

The advantages of asset purchase for the management team are that they retain ownership of the shares of stock of the business because only assets and liabilities, which are specifically identified in the purchase agreement, are transferred to the buyer. They can still control the operation and employees assignment. However, the transactions of Asset purchase are generally more complicated because ownership of the assets and liabilities and any related contracts must actually

What are the advantages of leveraging this company? The disadvantages? How would leveraging up affect the company’s taxes? How would the capital markets react to a decision by the company to increase the use of debt in its capital structure?

Aside from the two aforementioned proposals the company can raise its leverage in other ways. By conducting DuPont analysis and understanding operating leverage we see that purchasing fixed assets and decreasing stockholder’s equity will raise the equity multiplier and the firm’s operating leverage. In this instance we recommend against this approach as the firm already has a large amount of excess cash above what they require to fund new positive NPV projects and purchase new assets. Investors would rather see their capital returned to them in the form of share repurchases and dividends as it is evident by the company’s cash stockpile that they can

Higher leverage is very likely to create value for a firm considering capital structure change by exerting financial discipline and more efficient corporate strategy changes.

Increased leverage would increase the risk for the shareholder. This is due to the fact that an increased amount of debt would increase the financial return that investors expect. For example, if a company has no debt and posts better than expected earnings, the equity holder would get all of this benefit. If the company had some debt and posted better than expected earnings, the bond holders would get a fixed payment as usual, and shareholders would still enjoy increased profits; the problem arises if worse than expected profits were shown by Kelly Services. If Kelly Services had no debt and posted bad earnings, then the equity bears all the risk in that situation. However, if Kelly

Such decisions may affect the company’s profitability today but judging from the fact that high risk means low stock price and vice-versa, high return waits in the future.

On the other hand, more debt does not affect the risk of the project under taken, but means less equity holders , these bring more risk to equity holders, the cost of equity increases with debt. assume Ra is the WACC without leverage.

In a market with taxation, the value of the levered firm equals to the value of the unlevered firm plus the present value of interest tax shield.

When considering the proposed advertising program and technology upgrades, we have to ensure that the project will likely add value to the company, so we need to consider the return on investment versus the cost of capital. If the return on investment, measured by the net present value and internal rate of return, exceeds the cost of capital, the investment should be taken.

It seems then that companies should fully leverage the company or a least come close to doing so but there is a probability that the company enters financial distress as its leverage (D/E) increases. Financial distress can be very costly for companies, and the cost for this scenario is shown in the current market value of the levered firm's securities. Investors factor the potential for future distress into their assessment of the present value (this is where PV of distress costs is subtracted from un-levered company value and the PV of the tax-shield.) The value for the costs

The intangible asset will generate probable future economic benefits for the organization which can either be in the form of costs reduction or in the form of increasing revenue in the future for the organization.

* There is no incentive for a division to expand to the point where the marginal return on investment equals the cost of capital.

and difficult to predict as well as true comparable companies and market value might not