HIST 1402 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Discounted Cash Flow, Cash Flow, Capital Budgeting
Document Summary
12-1: capital budgeting is the whole process of analyzing projects and deciding whether they should be included in the capital budget. This process is of fundamental importance to the success or failure of the firm as the fixed asset investment decisions chart the course of a company for many years into the future. The payback, or payback period, is the number of years it takes a firm to recover its project investment. Payback may be calculated with either raw cash flows (regular payback) or discounted cash flows (discounted payback). In either case, payback does not capture a project"s entire cash flow stream and is thus not the preferred evaluation method. Note, however, that the payback does measure a project"s liquidity, and hence many firms use it as a risk measure: mutually exclusive projects cannot be performed at the same time. We can choose either project 1 or project 2, or we can reject both, but we cannot accept both projects.
