The Emory community has access to a wealth of business research resources, both databases and websites. This series highlights many of these great resources, including content and the best applications for classes and career prep.
What You Will Find
The Damodaran Online website is a must for your toolkit of valuation resources. Aswath Damodaran is a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, teaching classes in corporate finance and valuation. His website is broken down into four sections. The first, teaching, includes all of his corporate finance and valuation class materials (lecture notes, quizzes, etc.) for his MBA classes and the shorter (2-day to 3-day) executive sessions; he has also posted webcasts of the classes that are accessible on YouTube and other platforms. In addition, also teaches classes specifically tailored to an online audience on valuation, corporate finance and investment philosophies, as well as accounting and statistics classes.
The second, writing, contains links to almost everything he has written, including books and papers on topics such as equity risk premiums, cash flows and other things valuation-related. The third, data, contains Damodaran’s annual updates on industry averages on both corporate finance and valuation metrics for US and global companies. In this section he also provides estimates of equity risk premiums and costs of capital. The fourth, tools, incorporates the spreadsheets that he has created to value and analyze companies, as well as short in-practice webcasts on how to analyze companies.
Use for Class Projects
This website is packed with information that may be helpful for your classes, but it’s the data section that one of the most heavily used.
Damodaran’s goal is to provide data that can be used to create a narrative about a company and its value. He has focused on analyzing the data and coming up with measures of risk, profitability, leverage and value. While most of these measures are used widely, Damodaran has put his own twist on them, reflecting his corporate finance/valuation views. According to his website, his “belief that accountants are wrong in their treatment of operating leases and R&D leads me to capitalize both numbers, which in turn, changes the operating income, invested capital and other derived measures for a company.” On the website he lists the different data variables that he reports industry averages for and links to a document where he explains how he estimates each of the numbers. The data is further broken out by industries and by geography (U.S., Europe, Japan, Emerging Markets, and Global).
Use for Interview Prep
This website is a great resource for prepping for interviews for corporate finance, valuation, and even quantitative case interviews. The direct access to Damadaran’s articles, classes and class notes are invaluable and worth studying in preparation for your interview.
Additional Business Resources
You can also use the Business Research Guide to locate additional business resources, locate tips for how to use them, and understand which are best for your specific research needs.