Abstract (eng)
According to the recommendation of the KWT (Austrian Chamber of Public Ac-countants and Tax Advisers) the market risk premium (MRP), which is an integral part of the cost of capital used for discounting purposes in business valuations, for the Austrian capital market currently lies within a bandwidth of 5.5% to 7.0%. In practice, this means that there is considerable freedom when choosing a MRP. Hence, proper reasoning is essential when this decision is made.
This thesis aims at providing a tool for such reasoning. It focuses on the determi-nation of a MRP for the Austrian capital market using a forward-looking (implied) model. Therefore, a two-stage dividend discount model is applied. The model is realized in MS Excel, while the input-data is drawn from state-of-the-art financial data providers, such as Bloomberg or the Economist Intelligence Unit.
The results presented in this thesis estimate the current MRP in a bandwidth of 4.8% to 5.5%. Historically, the implied MRP lay below the recommendation of the KWT most of the time, but the parameters converged in the recent past. From the research it can be concluded that MRP are changing over time. Hence, a narrow, inflexible bandwidth which does not allow for the consideration of current economic developments does not seem to be appropriate for that parameter. From a wider recommended bandwidth for the MRP follows the need for more careful reasoning when appraisers derive the MRP they apply in their valuation models. As the discussion of the use of implied models to determine MRP has just started, especially in the European- / German-speaking-countries, there is still a lot of research to be done. The thesis represents a first empirical approach for the determination of the MRP for the Austrian capital market using an implied approach.