Alternative methods for estimating firm’s growth rate

摘要: The most common valuation model is the dividend growth model. The growth rate is found by taking the product of the retention rate and the return on equity. What is less well understood are the basic assumptions of this model. In this paper, we demonstrate that the model makes strong assumptions regarding the financing mix of the firm. In addition, we discuss several methods suggested in the literature on estimating growth rates and analyze whether these approaches are consistent with the use of using a constant discount rate to evaluate the firm’s assets and equity. The literature has also suggested estimating growth rate by using the average percentage change method, compound-sum method, and/or regression methods. We demonstrate that the average percentage change is very sensitive to extreme observations. Moreover, on average, the regression method yields similar but somewhat smaller estimates of the growth rate compared to the compound-sum method. We also discussed the inferred method suggested by Gordon and Gordon (1997) to estimate the growth rate. Advantages, disadvantages, and the interrelationship among these estimation methods are also discussed in detail.