Equity Finance

From the "Risk Management" series, this is a practical guide to the features and definitions of equity in respect of company ownership. It also examines convertible bonds and preference shares as a form of equity.

Disks contain supplementary forms on disc and examples in RTF format.

This book traces the historical rise of private equity finance in the US and UK over the last 40 years. It shows how this new industry has grown as credit markets have grown. It is clearly explained for the non-expert how financial gearing works in a leveraged buyout.

Emerging market stock issuance relative to GDP rose in the late twentieth century to levels that roughly matched that of advanced, industrial markets. Nonetheless, the connection between owning shares of emerging market stock and the ability to influence the management of these firms remains fundamentally different from the analogous institutional connection that has evolved in industrial markets. The reasons for the differences in emerging markets are both historical and political in nature. That is, local equity markets have had the objective of providing for some degree of local ownership and control of large economic entities since the late nineteenth century. However, local markets have operated under different global political structures since that time, ranging from imperialism, to world wars, to sovereign developmental states, to neo-liberal states. Shares issued under these different structures have been reconfigured over time, resulting in a lack of convergence along either the Anglo-American or Continental models of corporate governance. The author uses a political science paradigm to explain the growth of emerging equity markets. She departs from conventional economic explanations and examines politics at the micro-level of large issues of emerging market stock. The second half of the book presents case studies dealing with emerging market countries in Latin America, Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The case studies connect the regional, state, and firm levels to detail the multiple ownership and control arrangements, and to dispel the notion that mere quantitative growth of these markets will lead to a convergence in financial institutional structures along the lines of the industrial core of the world economy.

Capitalism is historically pervasive. Despite attempts through the centuries to suppress or control the private ownership of commercial assets, production and trade for profit has survived and, ultimately, flourished. Against this backdrop, accounting provides a fundamental insight: the 'value' of physical and intangible capital assets that are used in production is identically equal to the sum of the debt liabilities and equity capital that are used to finance those assets. In modern times, this appears as the balance sheet relationship. In determining the 'value' of items on the balance sheet, equity capital appears as a residual calculated as the difference between the 'value' of assets and liabilities. Through the centuries, the organization of capitalist activities has changed considerably, dramatically impacting the methods used to value, trade and organize equity capital. To reflect these changes, this book is divided into four parts that roughly correspond to major historical changes in equity capital organization. The first part of this book examines the rudimentary commercial ventures that characterized trading for profit from ancient times until the contributions of the medieval scholastics that affirmed the moral value of equity capital. The second part deals with the evolution of equity capital organization used in seaborne trade of the medieval and Renaissance Italian city states and in the early colonization ventures of western European powers and ends with the emergence in the market for tradeable equity capital shares during the 17th century. The third part begins with the 1719-1720 Mississippi scheme and South Sea bubbles in northern Europe and continues to cover the transition from joint stock companies to limited liability corporations with autonomous shares in England, America and France during the 19th century. This part ends with a fundamental transition in the social conception of equity capital from a concern with equity capital organization to the problem of determining value. The final part is concerned with the evolving valuation and management of equity capital from the 1920s to the present. This period includes the improvement corporate accounting for publicly traded shares engendered by the Great Depression that has facilitated the use of 'value investing' techniques and the conflicting emergence of portfolio management methods of modern Finance. Equity Capital is aimed at providing material relevant for academic presentations of equity valuation history and methods, and is targeted at researchers, academics, students and professionals alike.

Going Public investigates why companies routinely underprice themselves as they try to list themselves on the stock exchange. They subsequently underperform over the long-term and, in Going Public, the authors explore these 2 phenomena in plain English.